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Full-Text Articles in Law
New Realities Require New Priorities: Rethinking Sustainable Development Goals In The Anthropocene, Robin Kundis Craig
New Realities Require New Priorities: Rethinking Sustainable Development Goals In The Anthropocene, Robin Kundis Craig
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
The United Nations 17 sustainable development goals are nominally unprioritized. However, numerically and rhetorically, the list effectively makes development goals more important than the environmental goals. This de facto prioritization, however, is deeply flawed in two respects. First, as early sustainable development theorists acknowledged, the environment is the boundary of, not co-equal to, development, constraining potential progress both economically and socially. The Anthropocene’s rapidly accelerating deterioration of the global ecological and physical processes that make human development possible will ultimately constrain development options and potential. Second, human priorities will also change dramatically as adaptation to climate change — the most …
Dealing With Climate Change Under The National Environmental Policy Act, Arnold W. Reitze Jr.
Dealing With Climate Change Under The National Environmental Policy Act, Arnold W. Reitze Jr.
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was an important environmental law for several decades before climate change became an issue of concern. Beginning in the 1990s efforts began to include in NEPA’s environmental assessments and environmental impact statements both the impact of federal government actions on climate change and the impact of climate change on proposed federal actions. These efforts were encouraged by the Council on Environmental Quality. However, implementation at the agency level has been uneven. Some Federal agencies have resisted making serious efforts to incorporate climate change impacts into their decision-making process. Moreover, the courts have not been …
Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services At The Wildland-Urban Interface, Robin Kundis Craig, J.B. Ruhl
Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services At The Wildland-Urban Interface, Robin Kundis Craig, J.B. Ruhl
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars have fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI — that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the factor that rampant wildfire is …
Warming Oceans, Coastal Diseases, And Climate Change Public Health Adaptation, Robin Kundis Craig
Warming Oceans, Coastal Diseases, And Climate Change Public Health Adaptation, Robin Kundis Craig
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Climate change is changing the world’s ocean in three important ways. First, the ocean is warming. Second, sea levels are rising. Finally, ice is melting. All of these changes have important implications for human disease risk, ranging from a fairly prosaic increase in harmful algal blooms to the science-fictionish re-release of deadly microbes from long ago.
In the United States, coastal adaptation efforts to date have been sluggish. Many uncertainties attend climate change’s effects on the ocean, particularly with regard to sea-level rise and ice melting. In addition, the time scales involved are generally long, outside of the planning ken …
Reversing Course On Environmental Justice Under The Trump Administration, Uma Outka, Elizabeth Kronk Warner
Reversing Course On Environmental Justice Under The Trump Administration, Uma Outka, Elizabeth Kronk Warner
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
This Article traces how policy reversals in the first years of the Trump Administration implicate protections for diverse, low-income communities in the context of environmental pollution and climate change. The environmental justice movement has drawn critical attention to the persistent inequality in exposure to environmental harms, tracking racial and income lines. As a result of decades of advocacy, environmental justice has become an established, if not realized, principle in environmental law. Shifting positions under the Trump Administration now undermine this progress. To illustrate, this Article uses three exemplary contexts — agency transition, environmental law implementation, and international relations on climate …