Sierra Club v. San Diego County

The California Court of Appeal affirmed a trial court judgment barring San Diego County from using a 2016 guidance document on climate change analysis in California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) reviews. The appellate court found that challenges to the guidance were ripe and further found that the guidance violated CEQA because the guidance’s “Efficiency Metric” established a threshold of significance that should have been adopted by ordinance, resolution, rule, or regulation and developed through a public review process. The appellate court also found that the County did not provide substantial evidence to support the guidance’s reliance on statewide data. In addition, the Court of Appeal found that the issuance of the guidance constituted piecemeal environmental review at odds with an earlier decision by the appellate court concluding that the County’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) and thresholds of significance based on the CAP were a single project subject to environmental review. Therefore, despite the County’s contention that development of a CAP and thresholds of significance were underway and on schedule, the appellate court found that the 2016 guidance violated its earlier directive.

The California Court of Appeal affirmed. The appellate court agreed with the trial court that the County had erred in assuming that the CAP was within the scope of the County’s 2011 GPU. The 2011 GPU included mitigation measures, including one that committed the County to preparing a CAP that included detailed greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and deadlines and enforceable emissions reductions measures. The appellate court ruled that the CAP did not comply with these requirements. Moreover, because the CAP itself was a “plan-level document” that would facilitate additional development that would not be required to undergo additional review, a supplemental EIR should have been prepared for the CAP and the CAP should have included enforceable mitigation measures. In March 2015, the California Supreme Court denied a petition for review.

Sierra Club and other organizations commenced challenges to a revised Climate Action Plan adopted by San Diego County in 2018. In one case, Sierra Club filed a third amended petition asserting that the County had failed to comply with earlier judicial directives requiring, among other things, that the Climate Action Plan contain enforceable measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sierra Club and six other groups also filed a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/sierra-club-v-county-of-san-diego-2/">new lawsuit</a> seeking to set aside certain portions of the revised Climate Action Plan and the supplemental environmental impact report on which it was based, and also to set aside a threshold of significance established by the County that the petitioners alleged would allow development not contemplated by a 2011 General Plan Update, so long as developers obtained offsets, which could be obtained out of state or even outside of the country. In the new lawsuit, the petitioners asserted that this “offshoring of GHG emissions offsets” had been done without proper review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

In April 2013, the court set aside the County’s approval of the climate action plan (CAP). The court held that the CAP was not properly approved because it should have been subject to a supplemental environmental impact report (EIR). (The county had concluded in an addendum to the program EIR for the County’s 2011 General Plan Update (GPU) that the CAP fell within the program EIR’s scope.) The court further held that even if the CAP had been properly approved, it failed to meet the mitigation obligations in the program EIR for the GPU, which required the County to set detailed greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and deadlines and to implement enforceable greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures. Noting that the CAP describes itself as a “living document” and as a “a platform for the County to build strategies to meet its emission-reduction targets,” the court stated: “There is no time for ‘building strategies’ or ‘living documents;’ as the PEIR quite rightly found, enforceable mitigation measures are necessary now.”