To understand how well CEQA is addressing wildland-urban interface development, we analyzed data on environmental review for housing projects in three large exurban counties and additional cities with substantial wildland-urban interface areas. Our results indicate that CEQA and local land-use regulation may not be adequately addressing wildland-urban interface development in California. However, any policy response must also recognize the dire housing shortage in the state. Balancing the goals of reducing fire risk and increasing housing production suggests that increased housing development in low fire hazard urban infill areas, and a regional-level planning structure to properly plan for fire hazards, may be appropriate policy responses.
This Symposium Article focuses on the issue of wildfire emissions from federal forests and the challenges that wildfire emissions, and forests generally, pose for climate policy.
Historically, during times of perceived labor shortages in the U.S. agricultural industry, the federal government has enacted policies to ensure the availability of temporary agricultural guestworkers. The current H-2A Temporary Agricultural Guestworker program has been in place for decades, and its use is expanding rapidly. Yet, policies that guarantee a stream of agricultural workers have
Is there any escape from the consequences of man’s near-Promethean arrogance with fire? In spring 2021, ELQ and the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law centered this question in a half-day virtual symposium. The event brought academics, students, activists, and regulators into conversation about five burning issues: Federal
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has underscored the racial, social, and economic disparities that have long plagued every part of American society—including the health of our environment. Given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority communities across the country, government officials have focused their efforts on an equitable COVID-19 response. These efforts, however, have ignored marginalized individuals who are incarcerated. With its interdisciplinary approach, the environmental justice framework may provide a meaningful tool to effectively respond to the impact of COVID-19 in prisons.
This Article levels a critique of resource-driven capitalism and the associated, facilitative property rights from the position of ecosystem services. Pitting nature as resource against nature as ecosystem services reveals that the value of nature lies beyond the price of tradeable goods and that economic regicide results not from regulation of the environment, but from ecosystem degradation.
This Article will explore the little-known legal tools that North Korea has adopted in order to address environmental issues, with a specific focus on the Environmental Protection Law (1986) and the Environmental Impact Assessment Law (2005), because environmental impact assessment can serve as a barometer of the socialist country’s environmental policy.
Popular news outlets have effectively covered how homeowners living in high fire risk areas find it increasingly difficult to obtain property insurance. However, there is very little public discussion of, and little scholarship on, how California’s rules against using current and future risk data – including cutting edge climate science – in insurance premiums contributes to this difficulty.
Ecology Law Quarterly, one of the nation’s most respected and widely read environmental law journals.