LANCASTER, Calif.— The Center for Biological Diversity has sued the city of Lancaster for approving a plan to annex thousands of acres of Los Angeles County land to develop a massive warehouse complex.

“This mega-warehouse plan would turn open desert into an industrial complex bigger than downtown L.A.,” said Evan Levy, an attorney at the Center. “The diesel exhaust from thousands of semi-trucks going back and forth to these warehouses every day would dump tons of smog into Southern California communities already inundated with pollution. It’s shocking how little Lancaster officials did to reduce this huge project’s massive harms.”

The lawsuit¸ filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, asserts that the city failed to complete a thorough environmental analysis and refused to install rooftop solar, electric infrastructure or other measures to reduce environmental harms.

In October the Lancaster City Council approved a plan to develop more than 38 million square feet of industrial buildings and generate more than 163,000 vehicle trips each day. The sprawling warehouse and industrial project would also destroy more than 7,000 acres of Mojave Desert, which serves as habitat for burrowing owls, Crotch’s bumblebee and a rare plant known as the alkali mariposa lily.

Growth in the warehouse industry has exploded in Southern California in recent years.

In the 2000s warehouse developers began to look further from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for cheaper land. That has led to an explosion of warehouses in places like the Inland Empire, where square footage has nearly tripled since 2000. Warehouse developers see the Mojave desert as the next frontier, where a complex of this size is unprecedented.

Such growth has led to a public health crisis with frontline communities facing a disproportionate pollution burden. Those living in communities near the proposed warehouse campus already suffer from more asthma and cardiovascular disease than 95% of Californians.

The Center’s lawsuit says the city violated the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to analyze the project’s greenhouse gas and air quality impacts. The city also failed to include commonsense measures to reduce the project’s environmental harms, like installing rooftop solar and electric vehicle infrastructure.

“Greenlighting a project without a single solar panel on tens of millions of square feet of flat warehouse rooftops is indefensible,” said Levy. “Lancaster’s failure to push for solar power in this plan is especially shocking because this will eat up more energy than a medium-sized city.”

The lawsuit also says the city failed to consider and reduce wildlife harms in approving the warehouse plan. The project would build industrial buildings up to 100 feet tall just feet from the largest freshwater marsh in Los Angeles County. Piute Ponds is a wetland complex that provides habitat for more than 300 bird species, and many of them depend on the marsh to sustain their long-distance migrations.