Climate Policy Toolkit
March 19, 2009, The California Attorney General shares "Climate Change, the California Environmental Quality Act, and General Plan Updates: Straightforward Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions"
At any given time in this State, well over one hundred California cities and counties are updating their general plans. Climate change, however, has only fairly recently shown up on the CEQA radar and local governments and their planners have many questions about addressing CEQA in planning documents. In the linked document, the Attorney General’s office attempts to answer some of the most frequently asked of those questions.
October 24th, 2008 - ARB releases draft proposal" Recommended Approaches for Setting Interim Significance Thresholds for Greenhouse Gases under the California Environmental Quality Act "
"With this Staff Proposal, ARB staff is taking the first step toward developing recommended statewide interim thresholds of significance for GHGs that may be adopted by local agencies for their own use. The task that ARB staff is undertaking is, however, a limited one. Staff will not attempt to address every type of project that may be subject to CEQA, but instead will focus on common project types that, collectively, are responsible for substantial GHG emissions – specifically, industrial, residential, and commercial projects (The collective greenhouse gas emissions from the industrial, residential and commercial sectors, together with the transportation sector, represent approximately 80% of the statewide greenhouse gas emissions inventory in 2004). ARB staff believes that thresholds in these important sectors will advance our climate objectives, streamline project review, and encourage consistency and uniformity in the CEQA analysis of GHG emissions throughout the State."
During a public review of the proposal this morning, the ARB encouraged interested stakeholders to review and comment on the proposal. You can do so here.
The Institute for Local Government has prepared a series of Resources Related to Analyzing Climate Change Issues Under CEQA
The overall approach is summarized here;
"One approach to avoiding a potential CEQA challenge to a general plan is for cities to perform both a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and prepare a plan to address those emissions. Addressing the impact of a city’s policies, programs and operations on climate change can be incorporated into the city’s general plan in two phases:
1. Complete an environmental analysis of the impact of the land use, circulation, housing, open space, and air quality programs and policies on climate change in general and on greenhouse gas emissions more specifically;
2. Complete a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and adopt a greenhouse gas reduction plan either as an amendment to the general plan or as a required subsequent action.
One obstacle to incorporating climate change into the CEQA analytic framework is the lack of thresholds of significance to guide the analysis. The California Air Pollution Control Officers Association has developed recommendations for thresholds of significance which should be helpful in this regard (http://www.capcoa.org/).
In the alternative, a wide variety of CEQA documents have incorporated climate change analysis through the thresholds of significance adopted for an air quality impact analysis. A database of CEQA documents is available at http://www.ceqamap.com/."
ILG's site offers a number of additional strategies and resources for utilizing CEQA in climate planning.
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