Arctic Home Melting Away
Landmark bearded seal ruling elevates species to climate change icon
If you’ve never seen a bearded seal, they’re pretty amazing. Just as their name implies, they’ve got a tuft of bristly whiskers on a face that’s almost criminally cute.
But don’t be fooled: These guys are tough. They live year-round in frigid Arctic waters, spending most of their time underwater searching for food or atop the sea ice where they breed, raise their young, and try to avoid being eaten by polar bears.
Climate change is making their lives still tougher, even as it’s linked the bearded seal’s fate to that of its main predator. Polar bears and bearded seals both rely on sea ice for their survival, yet global warming is predicted to melt most of that ice — by the end of this century at the latest.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently recognized that reality, issuing a landmark ruling that placed bearded seals alongside polar bears as iconic symbols of climate change and the fight against warming-caused extinction.
After a long legal battle, polar bears won Endangered Species Act protection in a watershed moment when the Bush administration had to concede that climate change was driving them toward extinction. Now the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that bearded seals also deserve protection based on the projected loss of Arctic sea ice over the coming decades.
The ruling reinforces the idea that we have to take action to protect animals at risk from climate change now. It’s a resounding victory not just for bearded seals, but for all species threatened by climate change — and it could represent a sea change in environmental law.
The court agreed with the federal government and the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists that climate change models are reliable and can be used to determine whether a species warrants protection under the Act. Climate models that show the bearded seal’s sea-ice habitat disappearing by the end of this century, making its population decline inevitable in the foreseeable future — unless we act now.
Polar bears and bearded seals could be joined by many other climate-change poster children in the coming years. Another species of ice-dependent seal, the ringed seal, is likely to soon get the same protection as its whiskered cousin. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must make an Endangered Species Act determination next year for the Pacific walrus, another victim of rapidly declining sea ice.
The Arctic is on the front lines of climate change, experiencing warming at twice the rate of average global temperatures. But climate change is threatening the habitats of thousands of species all over the world as ocean waters warm and become more acidic and critters everywhere struggle to survive in a rapidly changing world — including many corals that have already been given federal protection because of climate change.
The Endangered Species Act can be a powerful tool, requiring the federal government to establish critical habitat and ensure its actions do not “jeopardize the continued existence” of the species or reduce that habitat. Studies show endangered species that have critical habitat protections are more than twice as likely to be recovering as those that don’t.
Yet protecting polar bears, bearded seals and other species that are directly threatened by global warming means slowing warming by swiftly reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Same thing with the corals, shellfish, pteropods and other species vulnerable to ocean acidification, a corrosive effect caused by the oceans absorbing carbon.
Our world is rapidly changing, but the courts are recognizing that climate scientists have a good idea how those changes will affect vulnerable species. Now we need to act on that knowledge. If we want to save polar bears and bearded seals — and the other species that will soon be joining their ranks — we must act now.
