The initiation of a government environmental criminal investigation or discovery of a serious compliance issue often triggers the need to conduct an internal investigation.

Given projections of sea-level rise and extreme precipitation from climate change, the United States will experience more frequent and more severe flood events in coming years. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies, therefore, should be geared toward making relocation the easiest and most attractive option for property owners to pursue. The authors propose that property owners should agree in advance not to rebuild following floods that cause substantial damage and, instead, to accept a government buyout of their property and relocate.

Since the 1980s, water governance has increasingly been linked to institutions and laws that engage local actors and closely relate to local ecosystems and catchments. These approaches, referred to as collaborative water governance, encompass new coalitions among governments, their agencies, and institutions of civil society, and are typically held together via guidelines, plans, and nonbinding agreements.

In practice, the Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ) has been treated as the “administering agency” for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and courts and most action agencies have regarded its rules as binding law. Yet, a close examination of NEPA’s language and evolution reveals that CEQ authority is grounded more in the president’s Article II power than in any statutory delegation from Congress. This executive-branch authority to implement NEPA has garnered strong judicial deference and remained unquestioned despite prevailing doctrine to the opposite effect.

It usually takes at least three to start a trend, but two recent appellate-level decisions suggest a new air pollution enforcement trend is in the making: Environmental plaintiffs may be able to avoid Clean Air Act (CAA) preemption by bringing state common-law tort claims against an intrastate emitting source. The plaintiffs in both Bell v. Cheswick and Freeman v. Grain Processing Corp. successfully convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the Iowa Supreme Court, respectively, that the CAA did not preempt their tort claims based on state common law.

In June 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed standards under §111(d) of the Clean Air Act (CAA)1 for state plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel-fired electric generating units (EGUs). These standards do not require states to use any particular means of emission reduction.

More than one decade after two circuit courts struck down the regulatory definition of “adverse modification” of critical habitat, two agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, are now proposing a comprehensive package of changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In May 2014, the Services proposed two rules and one new policy regarding the ESA. The first rule redefines “adverse modification” to place additional emphasis on species recovery after being listed as endangered.

This Article is adapted from Barry E. Hill, Environmental Justice: Legal Theory and Practice (3d ed. 2014), published by ELI Press. This textbook/handbook explores how environmental justice concerns are framed, addressed, and resolved in the United States through acts of civil disobedience; federal, state, and local government initiatives; litigation and alternative dispute resolution; and/or mediation. The Article describes the relationship between environmental justice and sustainable development, and surveys the history of the environmental justice movement.

This Article is adapted from Chapter Three of John R. Nolon, Protecting the Environment Through Land Use Law: Standing Ground, published in 2014 by ELI Press. The book updates and expands on the author’s previous work, describing in detail how localities are responding to new challenges, including the imperative that they adapt to and help mitigate climate change and create sustainable neighborhoods.

This Article is adapted from Chapter One of Next Generation Environmental Compliance and Enforcement (LeRoy C. Paddock and Jessica A. Wentz eds.) published in 2014 by ELI Press. The book emerged from a two-day EPA workshop covering a broad array of topics, ranging from general comparisons of different compliance approaches to focused case studies of regulatory programs.