Feds and greens reach deal on ESA deadlines

By Michael Doyle | 01/16/2025 01:40 PM EST

The proposed settlement would require the Fish and Wildlife Service to make decisions about species protections for each of the next five years.

A Western bumblebee on a purple flower.

A Western bumblebee spotted at Olympic National Park in Washington state. The bee is one of the species covered by a proposed Endangered Species Act settlement between the Fish and Wildlife Service and an environmental group. Jessica Rykken/National Park Service

The Fish and Wildlife Service has committed to make 76 Endangered Species Act decisions by the end of fiscal year 2029, under a proposed legal settlement with environmentalists that would guide the agency’s ESA work for the next several years.

If it wins the likely approval from a federal judge, the proposed settlement filed in court Wednesday sets out a timetable for a certain number of ESA decisions each year through Sept. 30, 2029. The settlement would also effectively wrap up a 5-year-old lawsuit that has already influenced the FWS’s challenging endangered species work.

“It’s great that these 76 embattled plants and animals will finally get a shot at badly needed protections,” said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “They shouldn’t have had to wait so long for protections in the first place.”

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The environmental organization filed the underlying lawsuit in February of 2020, targeting the FWS’s failure to meet ESA decision deadlines for 241 species. The federal agency had been obliged under the ESA to render a so-called 12-month decision on whether to list each species as threatened or endangered.

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