The first phase of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan protects millions of acres of California desert while directing renewable energy projects away from sensitive wildlife habitat.

For the iconic desert tortoise, today probably seems the same as yesterday. In the cool of the morning, tortoises emerge from their underground burrows, slowly venturing out into the desert in search of food. They are particularly fond of the fruit of the prickly pear. As the day heats up, they return to their burrows to wait out the hot sun.

But today is no ordinary day in the California desert. Interior Secretary Sally Jewel just finalized the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), protecting millions of acres of public lands in the California desert, and the wildlife that call them home. This plan identifies lands that are suitable for renewable energy development, away from public lands that are valuable to wildlife, and protects an area that encompasses the largest intact desert landscape in the United States.

Due to the spread of a respiratory disease and an extreme loss of habitat due to development, off-highway vehicles and grazing, desert tortoises are barely surviving. As healthy habitat is lost, and climate change alters the environment they have been so long adapted to, these and other animals struggle to find food, water, and shelter. But now these ancient desert denizens and other wildlife will have protections necessary to adapt to a changing climate. Today represents a turning point in conservation in the California desert.

It Was a Tough Start

Eight years ago, battles in this area over where to develop massive renewable energy projects raged on. Some energy companies chose to place their enormous industrial scale projects on valuable wildlife habitat, threatening the survival of some of the most iconic desert species.

Knowing there was a way to plan for renewable energy while still protecting the most important parts of the desert, we urged these companies, the conservation community, the federal government and the state of California to work together on developing renewable energy projects that would avoid harm to wildlife and their habitat.

A Victory for All in the End

Before this plan was put into place, there were 3.25 million acres of permanently protected lands within the area of the California desert covered by the DRECP. This sounds like a lot, but compared against what wildlife need to survive into the future, it wasn’t enough. The DRECP adds millions more acres of conservation lands, including the Silurian Valley and Chuckwalla Bench as National Conservation Lands, and the Pisgah Valley as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. All told, the DRECP protects and conserves more land than the entire state of Massachusetts.

Desert tortoise, desert bighorn sheep, golden eagles, desert kit foxes, a myriad of lizards, snakes and other reptiles as well as unique desert plants like the eerily recognizable Joshua tree benefit from this conservation plan. Large portions of their habitats are now protected from industrial scale development, degradation from poorly maintained roads, and other uses. Protecting this land also helps fight climate change. Native plants that sequester carbon dioxide are left to continue to grow, and absorb and store this greenhouse gas. Recent scientific studies show that disturbing California desert soil can release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So simply protecting so much of this ecologically valuable land will also help California to meet important carbon emission reduction goals.

Looking to the Future

The DRECP isn’t the end of this effort. This plan creates a roadmap for California and the federal government to meet ambitious clean energy goals. Just as it protects valuable habitat from energy development, it also identifies less valuable lands (old landfills or agricultural land, for instance) where renewable energy can be developed without severely impacting imperiled wildlife. A full 600 square miles of such land have been identified under the plan as Development Focus Areas for wind, solar and geothermal energy projects.

This plan also represents a new paradigm for wildlife conservation – one that starts with identifying the most important wildlife habitat to be conserved so species can survive into the future, even in the face of climate change and increased renewable energy development. It also incorporates robust public input – throughout the entire process, the DRECP received more than 14,000 public comments. We know that some of those comments came from supporters like you – thank you!

Climate change is happening now and the stakes couldn’t be higher. NASA declared July 2016 the hottest month on record globally, and Californians are living the very real impacts of climate change as we enter our fifth year of an historic drought and wildfires burn from Big Sur to Mendocino. California has long been a pioneer in fighting climate change, and it made its leadership known again earlier this month by passing two bills setting the most ambitious carbon pollution reduction goals on the continent. As my colleague Alex Jackson so aptly put it, “The world is watching and California is stepping up.”

The State’s ambitious climate change goals as spelled out in the new legislation will require significant development of solar and wind in the biologically rich California desert.  Fortunately California has long been a leader in conserving lands and wildlife as well as fighting climate change. In recognition of the importance of both conservation and climate change the State today partnered with the Department of the Interior to finalize the long-awaited Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP). Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and California Energy Commissioner Karen Douglas marked the signing of the Record of Decision for the landmark 10 million acre plan this morning in Palm Springs.

The DRECP is the result of 8 years of extensive state-federal partnership and stakeholder engagement—the final plan is the result of dozens of public meetings, the assessment of hundreds of datasets, and tens of thousands of public comments. The years of collaborative work on this landmark plan have paid off. The Department of Interior and their partners at the state of California should be congratulated for proving through the DRECP that conservation, clean energy and climate leadership can go hand in hand.

The DRECP is the most ambitious and innovative planning effort undertaken in the California desert and it strikes the right balance between the protection of critical desert resources and the responsible development of much-needed renewable energy—not an easy feat by any measure. The plan does this by embracing key principles of smart from the start planning that NRDC and other advocates have promoted for years:

• Assessing development at a landscape scale, rather than allowing site by site project decisions to be decided by a first come, first serve basis
• Guiding development to lower conflicts areas more appropriate for large scale development
• Deciding what lands should be off limits to development, by conserving lands that are ecologically important
• Requiring developers to meet a more strategic set of mitigation requirements, rather than allowing an ad hoc process that does not achieve meaningful conservation

Conservation

The final DRECP builds on California’s remarkable desert conservation legacy by permanently protecting some of the Mojave’s most special places, including the spectacular Silurian Valley, which lies in between Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve; the biologically rich and diverse Chuckwalla Bench in Riverside County; the biologically rich Pisgah Valley which is critically important to both the iconic desert tortoise and bighorn sheep; and the wonderfully unique Amargosa watershed which is home to endemic species found nowhere else on the planet.

The DRECP also includes important clarification around some of the desert’s most important conservation resources. The plan clarifies that BLM lands added to the special National Conservation Lands System—a system set up specifically to recognize and protect BLM lands with nationally significant resources—are protected forever; that means they cannot be taken out of conservation by future land management plans.

Clean Energy

The DRECP sets aside 388,888 acres (more than 600 square miles) of lower conflict land in Development Focus Areas or DFAs, where resource conflicts will be fewer and therefore development timelines will be shorter, mitigation obligations lower and project costs lower. The DFAs created through this plan include lands around the Salton Sea where renewable energy development has the potential to not only generate clean energy but also be part of a comprehensive solution to some of the Salton Sea’s ongoing environmental challenges. In addition, the plan identifies another 40,000 acres of Variance Lands where development is possible, but not streamlined.

The DRECP and Climate Leadership

As we move forward with pursuing our climate goals as aggressively as we can, it’s important to use all the tools at our disposal—the DRECP is a critical piece of a comprehensive plan to fight climate change that includes energy efficiency, conservation, distributed generation, and modernizing our electric grid to handle more renewables from both sides of the meter.

The passage of SB 350 in California, and more recently SB 32 and AB 197, and the federal Clean Power Plan are expected to drive a new round of utility scale renewable energy development across the west, so having plans in place to direct that development towards low conflict areas is particularly critical right now. The BLM component of the DRECP provides the cornerstone public lands element, and the next step is for the BLM and state agencies to work closely with the desert counties on Phase II of the DRECP to plan for renewable energy and conservation on private lands as well.

What’s Next?

Phase II of the DRECP—the private lands piece involving the 7 counties within the DRECP planning area—Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego—will help align federal, state and local renewable energy development and conservation plans, policies and goals. To date, with funding support from the California Energy Commission, three counties have already identified 326,750 acres for renewable energy development on non-federal lands. Finalizing the private lands piece of the DRECP is essential to realizing the comprehensive, desert-wide vision originally articulated for the DRECP back in 2008 and for protecting California’s unique conservation legacy and clean energy future.

Massive solar power farms may be developed on large portions of the California desert under deals announced between the state and federal governments this week.

Called the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, the renewable energy and conservation planning effort covers 10.8 million acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the California desert.

Ultimately a blueprint is to be reached covering 22 million acres of public and private land in California’s desert region, which would be marked for streamlining renewable energy development while conserving ecosystems and providing outdoor recreation opportunities.

The lands specifically identified for renewable energy development by the plan have the potential to generate up to 27,000 megawatts of renewable energy – enough to power over eight million homes.

“Renewable energy is a key part of California’s approach to addressing climate change, and large scale renewable energy projects in the California desert will play an essential role in California meeting climate and renewable energy goals,” says California Energy Commissioner Karen Douglas.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Land Use Plan Amendment identifies priority areas for renewable energy development while setting aside land for conservation and outdoor recreation. The plan designates areas with high-quality solar, wind and geothermal energy potential and access to transmission, sited in low conflict areas.

Applications in these areas could see a streamlined permitting process, predictable survey requirements, and simplified mitigation measures, the BLM says

The Interior Department is also considering additional financial incentives for projects located in these areas.

For decades, environmentalists have rhapsodized about the tranquil beauty of California’s deserts while battling fiercely with energy companies, the government and within their own ranks over what if any power production should occur on those sun-baked, wind-blown, geothermally active expanses of land.

On Wednesday, U.S. Interior Department officials signed a blueprint that they touted as a finely tuned effort to balance conservation of California’s iconic desert landscapes with the state’s growing hunger for clean energy in the age of climate change.

Eight years in the making, the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan implicitly recognizes that “green” energy can be environmentally destructive.

It puts 9.2 million acres of federal land in the California desert off limits to solar, wind and geothermal development, while steering renewable projects to less ecologically valuable areas on about 800,000 acres, with a particular emphasis on roughly half that land.

Projects proposed for Development Focus Areas would enjoy streamlined permitting. Energy development would also be possible on other lands, totaling more than 400,000 acres, but without streamlining.

Increasing the amount of renewable energy produced on federal lands has been a key part of the Obama administration’s climate change policies, which seek to cut fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.

“You are the epicenter of that here in the Southern California desert,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told federal, state, local and tribal officials who had gathered  at a signing ceremony in Palm Desert. “We’ve all come together in a way that is a path forward for the rest of the nation.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who has successfully shepherded major desert protection acts, praised the blueprint.

“The desert’s sweeping desert vistas and rugged mountain terrain provide vital refuge for everything from bighorn sheep and desert tortoises to Joshua Trees and Native American artifacts. The desert likewise holds great potential for utility-scale renewable energy,” Feinstein said in a statement. “We must ensure that the proper balance is struck.”

Several environmental groups also lauded the announcement.

“This plan is a thoughtful and balanced blueprint for the future of the California desert,” said Dan Smuts, senior regional director for the Wilderness Society. “It provides a model for the entire nation by addressing the urgent need for clean energy while protecting important lands for wildlife and plants.”

At least one organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, faulted the Interior Department for not adopting stronger protections. While the document permanently conserves about 2.8 million acres, other lands could be opened to energy development under future plans, warned Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist with the center.

The blueprint, which was the subject of more than 16,000 comments and nearly a dozen public hearings, marks the first part of an effort to map renewable energy development on 22 million acres of the California desert.

The next phase will deal with private holdings in seven desert counties. To date, three counties have pegged 326,750 acres for renewables on nonfederal lands.

The push for renewables by the federal government and California has put the state’s sprawling desert lands in the cross hairs.

Wind turbines, solar panels and geothermal plants are essentially industrial facilities that can kill birds en masse and scrape the desert floor clean of vegetation as well as all the creatures that depend on it.

Some conservation groups have complained that the desert — a place of spare charms that not all appreciate — has been turned into a sacrifice zone in the war to slow climate change.

The Ivanpah solar plant west of Las Vegas, for example, is a magnet for insects and the birds that feast on them. Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds a year die from crashes or immolation while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.