Office Of Planning And Research Issues Its Technical Advisory On CEQA And Climate Change

The California Office of Planning and Research (OPR) today issued a Technical Advisory entitled "CEQA and Climate Change: Addressing Climate Change Through California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Review" (see attached PDF file.)

The Advisory includes OPR’s recommended approach for lead agencies performing climate change analyses for projects which generate Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG), as well as a list of technical resources and modeling tools for estimating GHG emissions, and examples of GHG reduction measures.

The Advisory is general in nature. Of particular interest, the Advisory indicates each lead agency will have to develop its own approach to evaluating GHG emissions. It does not propose a particular method for evaluating the GHG emissions generated by a project, nor does it recommend the use of a particular threshold of significance for evaluating a project’s cumulative impacts due to GHG emissions.

The Advisory states that OPR hopes to deliver proposed CEQA Guidelines concerning the evaluation of climate change (guidelines it was directed to prepared by AB 97) as early as January 2009.