## Facts

- The Secretary of the Interior approved a 2007–2012 five-year offshore oil and gas leasing program for areas including the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi Seas.
- Environmental and Alaska Native groups petitioned for direct review, alleging violations of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
- Petitioners argued the program inadequately addressed climate change (both effects on the region and emissions impacts), relied on insufficient biological baseline data, and failed to consult under the ESA regarding listed species.
- Petitioners also contended the agency’s OCSLA-required assessment of “relative environmental sensitivity” improperly relied on a NOAA shoreline sensitivity study as a proxy for sensitivity across offshore planning areas.

## Issues

1. Whether petitioners had standing to press climate-related challenges to the leasing program, including limits on merits-based climate injury theories.
2. Whether NEPA claims challenging the program’s climate-change analysis and baseline-data adequacy were ripe at the five-year program stage.
3. Whether ESA consultation claims were ripe at the five-year program stage.
4. Whether OCSLA required the agency, at the program stage, to assess climate-change effects and to compile additional baseline biological data beyond what the agency used.
5. Whether the agency complied with OCSLA’s requirement to consider the relative environmental sensitivity and marine productivity of different areas when it relied primarily on a shoreline sensitivity study.

## Decision

- The court dismissed the NEPA-based climate-change claims as unripe.
- The court dismissed the NEPA baseline-data claims as unripe.
- The court dismissed the ESA consultation claim as unripe.
- The court held the OCSLA-based climate-change claims were ripe but failed on the merits.
- The court held the OCSLA baseline-data challenge was ripe but failed on the merits.
- The court granted the petition in part and remanded because the agency’s OCSLA environmental-sensitivity analysis irrationally relied on an insufficient NOAA shoreline-sensitivity study without reasonably differentiating sensitivity among planning areas.

## Legal Principles

- Standing for climate-related claims still requires injury, causation, and redressability; generalized climate harms may support only procedural-injury theories tied to a concrete interest.
- Ripeness in the offshore leasing context depends on the stage of decisionmaking; broad programmatic challenges under NEPA and ESA may be premature when impacts and consultations are expected to become concrete at later, site-specific stages.
- OCSLA does not compel global climate modeling or the level of climate analysis petitioners sought at the five-year program stage; the agency may defer more detailed assessment to later stages consistent with the statute’s balancing structure.
- OCSLA does not impose a rigid requirement to compile extensive biological baseline data at the program stage; the agency may rely on existing information and plan further data collection, absent arbitrary decisionmaking.
- OCSLA requires reasoned consideration of the relative environmental sensitivity and marine productivity of different areas; reliance on an ill-suited proxy study that fails to capture meaningful regional differences is unlawful.

## Conclusion

The court largely declined to reach program-stage NEPA and ESA challenges as premature, upheld the agency’s program-stage approach to climate and baseline-data considerations under OCSLA, but remanded because the agency failed to perform a reasoned, comparative environmental-sensitivity analysis required by OCSLA when selecting and prioritizing offshore planning areas.


Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Dep’t of the Interior, 563 F.3d 466 (D.C. Cir. 2009)