Today, the White House Council on Environmental Quality released its final phase II rule updating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. This is the final rule in a multi-phased process to ensure NEPA’s relevance to solving our most pressing problems, while undoing many harmful changes made by the Trump administration. The final rule requires federal agencies to consider climate and environmental justice impacts in their NEPA analyses and mandates meaningful, early consultation with impacted communities, including Tribes.

NEPA is the nation’s foundational environmental law, requiring the federal government to engage with communities and stakeholders on proposed projects to consider and disclose health, economic, and environmental impacts. In 2020, former President Trump gutted NEPA by severely undermining the review process and the scope of its applicability, limiting public participation, and curtailing the ability of federal agencies to consider the climate and cumulative environmental impacts on major projects.

After the rule’s release, Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen issued the following statement:

“Smart, transparent blueprinting for the future has never been more important. We need to build out the clean energy infrastructure of the future as efficiently and affordably as possible, while forcing a shift in business-as-usual thinking that is driving fossil fuels expansion, entrenching environmental injustice, and accelerating biodiversity loss. This new rule restores NEPA to its original intent while modernizing its implementation to address the scale of the environmental problems we face now.

“Importantly, by facilitating upfront problem-solving, these updated regulations provide clean energy project sponsors with greater certainty and clarity. When people who have the most at stake are engaged with each other at the outset, and there is a good faith effort to identify and solve problems from the start, the end results are better, with good projects moving forward faster.

“NEPA is a critical framework for informed decision-making that is more important than ever in this age of environmental consequences. We thank the Biden administration for restoring clarity to the NEPA regulations after the chaos of the Trump administration. As we thoroughly review the regulations, we applaud this crucial effort to revitalize NEPA in practice and reaffirm its importance to meeting our climate and environmental justice goals.”