Trump Weakens Endangered Species Protections, Making It Harder to Consider Effects of Climate Change

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13082019/climate-change-endangered-species-act-arctic-trump-changes-polar-bears-wildlife

By Sabrina Shankman
Aug. 12, 2019

The Trump Administration announced major changes Monday to the way it will implement the Endangered Species Act, weakening protections for threatened species and critical habitat and making it harder to take future risks from climate change into account.

The act has been credited with keeping 99 percent of listed species from becoming extinct, including humpback whales and bald eagles.

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The revisions weaken the Endangered Species Act in key ways. They make it harder to take climate change into account when deciding whether a species needs protection, and they limit protections for critical habitat. They also allow the agencies to consider economic interests when deciding whether to list a species—something that was explicitly forbidden in the past.

And they make it harder to list threatened species—those with populations that appear to be stable but which face risks from expected loss of habitat, like ice-dependent species or those susceptible to sea level rise.

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The oil and gas industry, which has long argued that the Endangered Species Act restricts its ability to pursue natural resources by putting some areas off limits, would benefit from the revisions, and the American Petroleum Institute said it welcomed the Interior Department's changes.

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The revision to the act comes just months after a major United Nations report found that a million species are at risk of extinction, and that climate change is a key driver. In order to save ecosystems from collapse, the report called for "urgent and concerted efforts fostering transformative change."

"It's sad. It's just so myopic," said Thomas Lovejoy, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation who has studied biodiversity for 30 years. What's frightening, he said, is that "it's very easy to actually do a poor economic analysis, which basically sets it up so that the endangered species take it in the chin."

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