Use Of Long-Term Climate Projections For Bearded Seal Listing Not Necessarily A Bellwether For Endangered Species Act Decisions

The Ninth Circuit this week upheld a National Marine Fisheries Service decision to list the Pacific bearded seal as threatened under the Endangered Species Act based primarily on threats from climate change, reversing a district court decision that invalidated the NMFS rulemaking.  The court's opinion in Alaska Oil & Gas Ass'n v. Pritzker, No. 14-35806, was consistent with a 2013 D.C. Circuit opinion that upheld listing the polar bear as threatened based on climate change projections, and with a Ninth Circuit opinion earlier this year that upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's reliance on climate change models as the "best available science" for designating polar bear critical habitat.  But this week's opinion was noteworthy because the NMFS listing of the bearded seal relied on very long-term (through 2100) climate change predictions to determine that the species is likely to become endangered, while the polar bear listing only evaluated a 45-year "foreseeable