Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance v. Burke

Ten environmental and historic preservation organizations challenged the Richfield Resource Management Plan and Travel Plan for 2.1 million acres of federal land in south-central Utah.  Although the federal district court for the District of Utah found that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had failed to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act and with its own off-highway vehicle (OHV) minimization criteria, the court rejected plaintiffs’ claim that BLM failed to take into account the impacts of OHV damage in the context of climate change as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Secretarial Order 3226, which requires agencies within the Department of the Interior to “consider and analyze potential climate change impacts when undertaking long-range planning exercises . . . [and] when developing multi-year management plans.”  The court found that BLM’s evaluation of OHV impacts and climate change was sufficient to comply with the Secretarial Order and NEPA. The court noted that “[t]he EIS in this case identifies the climate changing pollutants at issue, the studies regarding the environmental impacts of those pollutants, and the activities in the Richfield Planning Area that may generate emissions of such climate changing pollutants,” and that the EIS had “established the existing baseline climate of the Richfield Planning Area” and determined the “potential long-term emissions impacts associated with OHV use … to be minimal.”  The court also pointed to portions of the EIS that indicated that certain activities in the plan such as management of vegetation to favor perennial grasses could actually sequester carbon.