The New NEPA Regulations: A Practical Guide to What You Need to Know

In September 2020, the Council on Environmental Quality enacted new regulations that set forth procedures federal agencies are to utilize when implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Numerous commentaries published on the subject have either adopted a Chicken Little approach (i.e., sky is falling) to describing the changes, or an overly optimistic assessment of their likely implications for proponents of federal actions subjected to environmental review.

On December 10, 2020, our Environment and Land Use Group presented a complimentary webinar, "The New NEPA Regulations: A Practical Guide to What You Need to Know," in order to discuss these new changes.

Our panel gave practitioners a nuts and bolts guide to the new rules and discussed:

• The most important changes made to NEPA
• How the new rules differ from the old
• How to apply new rules to your project
• Possible issues that might arise when applying the new rules and how this might affect project development