Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Forest Service

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's rulings on the parties' summary judgment motions. The defendants did not appeal the court's determination that the U.S. Forest Service failed to take the required hard look at the project's impacts on carbon emissions, so the Ninth Circuit's decision does not address this issue.

The federal district court for the District of Montana barred the U.S. Forest Service from continuing with a project in the Kootenai National Forest until the federal defendants remedied violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Forest Management Act. The project involved commercial timber harvest on 3,902 acres, 45% of which was to be clearcut. The NEPA violations included a failure to adequately assess the project’s climate impacts. The court determined that the Forest Service considered the project’s impact on carbon emissions “only in general terms, which does not meet NEPA’s ‘hard look’ standard.” The court said the Forest Service failed to explain its determination that no further analysis of the project’s impacts on climate change was required because the project would affect “only a tiny percentage of the forest carbon stocks of the Kootenai National Forest, and an infinitesimal amount of the total forest carbon stocks of the United States.” The court noted that the Ninth Circuit had rejected this logic in a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/350-montana-v-bernhardt/">case</a> involving coal mining. In the instant case, the court identified two specific shortcomings in the Forest Service’s analysis: (1) a reliance on “cookie-cutter and boilerplate” analysis instead of utilization of “high quality and accurate information” as required by NEPA and (2) a failure to provide a scientific explanation to back up the assertion that a net increase in carbon sequestration resulting from a healthier forest would outweigh the short-term loss of carbon from logging. The court distinguished <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/hapner-v-tidwell/">two</a> <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/swomley-v-schroyer/">earlier</a> cases that involved environmental reviews of smaller logging projects.