A Summary Of Published Appellate Opinions Under The California Environmental Quality Act
In 2016, the California appellate courts issued published opinions in 21 CEQA cases. In several of those opinions, including a ground-breaking decision by the California Supreme Court, the courts grappled with limits on the scope of required environmental review for a subsequent project approval after a negative declaration or EIR has previously been adopted or certified for the project. Other key decisions addressed emergent questions regarding the requirements for analyzing the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, as well as mitigation of those impacts.
Courts also considered the boundaries of CEQA’s reach, one finding that CEQA is not concerned with the social and psychological effects of a change in community character, and another confirming that CEQA generally applies to a project’s effects on the environment, not to the environment’s impacts on a project. And in a controversial decision that may have far-reaching implications, an appellate court found an EIR deficient because it did not provide evidence supporting its use of policies from the agency’s general plan as standards of significance.