SAVING THE POLAR BEAR

The great white polar bear is the youngest and largest of the world’s bear species — a mighty hunter and fierce defender of its young that’s among the world’s most vulnerable animals. Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be extinct by 2050 if greenhouse gas-fueled global warming keeps melting their Arctic sea-ice habitat.

The Center has led the charge to save polar bears from extinction. We wrote the 2005 scientific petition calling for the bear’s protection under the Endangered Species Act, and we filed suit twice with our partners to force the administration to take action on that petition. In May 2008, our work paid off when the bear was finally listed as threatened under the Act. In 2010, our work spurred the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect 120 million acres of the species’ habitat, the largest critical habitat designation in Endangered Species Act history.

Unfortunately, in December 2010 Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a revised offshore plan allowing drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea — putting polar bears and the entire Arctic ecosystem at risk, even after the disastrous April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve filed a notice of intent to sue over the issue. And despite a separate Center suit against Shell drilling in polar bear habitat in the Beaufort Sea, in August 2011 the Obama administration said it would allow Shell drilling to begin in summer 2012.

And the polar bear still doesn’t have complete federal protection. When former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear would be listed as threatened, he simultaneously vowed he wouldn’t let the listing affect U.S. climate policy, executing an illegal final “4(d)” rule exempting greenhouse gas emissions and oil development — by far the two leading threats to the bear — from regulation under the Endangered Species Act. We immediately challenged the rule, made final in December 2008, and fought to change the polar bear’s status from “threatened” to the more protective “endangered” — in which case the rule would have to be tossed. In December 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar refused to upgrade the bear’s status, but the next year a judge struck down the Bush rule and ordered a new rule — putting the bear’s fate directly in the hands of the Obama administration.

Fortunately, though this species is still classified as “threatened,” our work has so far helped it keep its protected status, as well as its vast critical habitat, despite lawsuits by  those who would take them away (including a trophy-hunting group, the oil industry and the state of Alaska). We’re still working to win the best polar bear protection possible.

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