Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management

The federal district court for the District of Nevada largely upheld approvals for the first phase of “a massive water-redistribution pipeline” intended to carry millions of gallons of water to Nevada’s most populous county, including by rejecting the plaintiff’s argument that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) did not take a hard look at the extent to which climate change might amplify the project’s environmental impacts. The court found that BLM adequately considered climate change impacts by generally considering global climate change and regional climate change trends. The court rejected the plaintiffs’ contention that BLM’s assessment should have included specific climate change data, finding that the plaintiffs had failed to point to any “hard data” that BLM should have included in its analysis. The court also agreed with BLM that new climate change studies indicating an increased risk of drought in the Southwest did not warrant preparation of a supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS). The court concluded that the studies provided “no new, raw data about how climate change might affect the pipeline’s environmental impact” and that BLM had already qualitatively considered the studies’ conclusions in its EIS.