On May 14, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that he accepted the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The decision was made after months of delay and only following a court order.

Under ESA, a species is threatened when it is at risk of becoming endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or most of its range.

In January 2007, the FWS proposed a listing of polar bears as threatened. By law, the agency was required to make a final listing decision by January 9, 2008, but it failed to meet the deadline. Environmental organizations filed suit in federal court in April calling for a halt in the delays to the listing decision. Judge Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, ruled that the final listing decision must be published in the Federal Register by May 15, rejecting a U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) request to delay the decision until the end of June.

The issue of whether to list polar bears under the ESA stemmed from concern that populations are in decline, largely from the actual and projected loss of their critical habitat?sea ice?primarily due to climate change. The bears use sea ice as a platform for hunting their primary prey base, seals. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revealed that, in 2007, Arctic sea ice was at its lowest level recorded by satellite, nearly 40 percent below the long-term average of 1979 through 2007. Some USGS climate models project declines of 30 percent or more of September sea ice in the next 40 to 50 years and a 97-percent decline by the end of the century.

"[Polar bears] are not terrestrial animals," said USGS scientists Steve Amstrup. "They spend most of their time on sea ice, this cap of ice that is floating around on the surface of the Arctic Ocean. It is on that surface that they have adapted ways of catching seal."

The Arctic polar bear population is estimated at 20,000 to 25,000. Last September, USGS scientists predicted that, with the projected loss of sea ice, the population will be reduced by two-thirds in the next 50 years. However, detractors cite the unreliability of climate-change models that predict species impacts that far into the future. They contend that the models extend the definition of "foreseeable" well beyond the accepted time considerations used in ESA listing decisions.

In late April, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada recommended that the polar bear be designated as a species of special concern, but that it is not imminently threatened with extinction.

Given the findings of the USGS reports, the FWS reopened and then extended the comment period to allow the public time to review the information and respond. Because of the extension, the FWS claimed that it was unable to meet the deadline required under the ESA. "We received numerous comments on the USGS reports and have been working to analyze and respond to the information provided during the comment period," the FWS noted in a January 2008 press release. "At the time, we made the decision to reopen and to extend the comment period, the Director of the Service alerted the [DOI] that the [FWS] might need extra time to adequately evaluate and incorporate results from the comments received."

In early April, a host of conservation organizations submitted a letter to the leadership of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to, "oppose any actions that would ban the importation of trophies of polar bears legally taken from healthy populations in Canada, including a listing of the species under the Endangered Species Act." The organizations contended that, "an import ban arising from an ESA/Marine Mammal Protection Act listing will not reduce polar bear mortality in Canada, will harm current successful polar bear conservation and management, and will harm cash-strapped native communities in Canada."

Environmental organizations and even the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), alleged that the listing decision was delayed in order to allow DOI to sell oil leases in the Chukchi Sea, an area between Alaska and Siberia that is home of about 20 percent of all polar bears. The oil sale, held by the U.S. Mineral Management Service (MMS) in February, auctioned $2.5 billion in 10-year leases. Concerns have been raised that the implications of oil development in the Chukchi Sea could directly impact bears with habitat loss and the potential for catastrophic oil spills. The MMS environmental impact statement assessed the risk of a spill of more than 1,000 barrels of oil at 40 percent, and it estimated that only 10 to 20 percent of the spilled oil could be recovered given the harsh seas and broken ice conditions of the area. FWS Director Dale Hall responded: "We don't have substantial records that the oil and gas exploration has created an issue for the polar bear."

In announcing the listing decision, Secretary Kempthorne observed: "Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use of the ESA to regulated greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources. That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the ESA law. The EAS is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy." This supported President George W. Bush's statement of last month that "The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change."

Secretary Kempthorne also noted that Canada, which is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bear population, has not listed the species as threatened. However, he and Canada's Minister of the Environment did sign a memorandum of understanding for the conservation and management of polar bears. (jas)