The Biden-Harris administration has restored a series of rules for protecting threatened and endangered species and their habitats in the US under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), rolled back by the previous Trump administration.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) published three finalised rules that will remove all of the changes to the ESA’s section 7 and section 4 made by the former president.

Amendments brought back the so-called “blanket rule” option for protecting threatened species under section 4(d) of the ESA, a decades-old regulation that had been loosened in 2019. The rule mandates automatic endangered-level protections also for “threatened” species – one step short of “endangered”, the highest risk of extinction under the ESA – without requiring specific protection plans for each species.

Furthermore, while Trump’s changes required federal officials to publish the economic impacts of listing decisions, under the new rules they will be able to list a species as threatened and endangered without taking into account economic factors. This will make it easier to designate areas as critical for a species’ survival based on best scientific data available.

The Biden-Harris administration also allows agencies to assess the threat of climate change in their protection efforts.

“These revisions underscore our commitment to using all of the tools available to help halt declines and stabilise populations of the species most at-risk,” USFWS Director Martha Williams said in a statement.

“We will continue to use the best available science when implementing the ESA — including when making listing and delisting decisions, designating critical habitats, developing protective regulations for threatened species, and consulting on federal actions.”

According to the US Department of the Interior, almost half a million comments were received during the public comment periods on these rules.

“Even though this may feel like administration vs administration, these changes are common sense changes to align text with the intent of the law,” Becca Madsen, director of the Restoration Economy Center at Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), wrote on the group’s blog.

As Madsen noted, additional changes have been made in sections 7 and 4(d):

• Offsetting the impact of incidental take is now considered a reasonable and prudent measure (RPM), both onsite and offsite
• The mitigation hierarchy has been added to RPMs
• Federally recognised tribes will be allowed to take threatened wildlife or plants without a permit for the actions noted, since “by definition, tribes are sovereign nations with the right to self-govern within their own territories”

“MISSED OPPORTUNITY”

While environmentalists welcomed the major changes, several organisations pointed out that Biden’s administration missed a “massive” opportunity to truly strengthen the act.

“We needed bold solutions to guide conservation as the climate crisis drives more and more animals and plants to extinction. Instead, we’re mostly still stuck with the disastrous anti-wildlife changes made by the previous administration,” said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a US-based not-for-profit conservation organisation.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the final rules “retain a number of harmful provisions governing the responsibility of federal agencies to avoid jeopardising protected species or harming their critical habitat”, including one rule that requires federal actions to affect species’ critical habitat “as a whole” before real habitat protections are put in place.

“This is particularly harmful for wide-ranging animals like the northern spotted owl, polar bear, or gulf sturgeon that have large critical habitat designations but are still at risk of extinction.”

Although the US has not yet ratified the treaty that established the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity Diversity (CBD), the Biden administration has pledged to conserve 30% of the nation’s land and coastal seas by 2030 in accordance with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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