New Trump rules would curb U.S. endangered species protections

[Belsnickel]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/new-trump-rules-would-curb-us-endangered-species-protections

Quote:President Donald Trump’s administration announced changes to Endangered Species Act (ESA) rules today that complicate efforts to protect at-risk animals and plants by requiring higher standards for government action.

The new rules will apply only to future listing decisions. Plants and animals with existing protections won’t be affected unless their status changes.

Administration officials hailed the reforms as balancing conservation with economic interests.

“The best way to uphold the Endangered Species Act is to do everything we can to ensure it remains effective in achieving its ultimate goal—recovery of our rarest species. The Act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

“An effectively administered Act ensures more resources can go where they will do the most good: on-the-ground conservation.”

Environmentalists promised to challenge the changes in court, and Democrats promise to attack them on Capitol Hill.

The rules track with the administration’s draft regulations in making the biggest change in a generation to a broad swath of the federal conservation regime.

Some of the regulations’ biggest impacts deal with the difference between threatened and endangered species.

Wildlife is deemed threatened when it’s at risk of becoming endangered in the “foreseeable future.” The administration wants to consider only future factors that it deems “likely,” not just possible.

The draft regulations would have also allowed the government to disregard some data from computer models; it’s not clear whether the final rule keeps that provision.

“We’ll look out in the future only so far as we can reliably predict and not speculate,” said Gary Frazer, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s assistant director for ecological services.

There’s no exact time frame the government will follow, he said, adding that the new standard will codify the Interior Department solicitor’s opinion that the government currently relies on.

“It’ll only go so far as we can reasonably determine that the threats—so this might be climate-induced changes in the physical environment—and the species’ responses to those threats are likely. That we’re not speculating about those,” Frazer said.

Threatened and endangered species have enjoyed some identical protections since 1978, when the Fish and Wildlife Service used its flexible authority to automatically grant threatened species the same safeguards as endangered ones from harm or disturbance. That’s known as the “blanket 4(d) rule.”

The administration is ending that. FWS will now have to craft individual regulations for each threatened species.

Administration officials said that provision would encourage better conservation plans, including more voluntary programs. Conservationists predict the extra work will worsen the service’s backlog.

The regulations call for greater emphasis on economic impact analysis, even as environmental groups note the law forbids anything except science from influencing a listing decision.

The regulations allow the government to present economic impacts alongside a listing decision. To stay within the law, separate teams would work in parallel on the listing decision and the economic analysis, officials said.

The rules also change the way officials designate critical habitat for a species’ recovery. Officials would have to consider protecting areas already occupied by the species before considering unoccupied habitat. Those decisions had been made in tandem in the past.

More at the link. Hard to see this as anything other than putting corporate interests over conservation of our resources, which is unfortunate.