Government reaches agreement on polar bear habitat

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The federal government will designate "critical habitat" for polar bears in the ocean off Alaska's coast, a decision that could add restrictions to future offshore petroleum exploration or drilling.

Federal law prohibits agencies from taking actions that may adversely modify critical habitat and interfere with polar bear recovery. That likely will affect oil and gas activity, said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of three groups that sued to force the critical habitat designation.

"Other than global warming, the worst thing that's going on in polar bear habitat right now is oil development and the potential for oil spills," Siegel said.

Bruce Woods, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, said there's already critical habitat designated in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast for the threatened spectacled eider, a sea duck, though that could be a far smaller area than what might be designated for polar bears.

"I have no way of knowing what might be designated for the polar bear," he said, especially given that sea ice conditions are changing and areas now covered by ice might in the future be open water.

The agreement to designate critical habitat was filed Monday as part of a partial settlement of a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Siegel's group.

They filed the lawsuit in March after Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne missed a January deadline for declaring polar bears threatened or endangered.

Kempthorne on May 14 declared polar bears "threatened," or likely to become endangered, citing polar bears' need for sea ice, the dramatic loss of sea ice in recent decades and computer models that suggest sea ice is likely to further recede in the future.

Polar bears use sea ice to hunt seals. Summer 2007 set a record low for sea ice in the Arctic. The ice melt this summer was the second lowest on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

Oil and gas development was not seen as a major factor in the listing decision.

Siegel said that except in certain cases, critical habitat must be designated at the same time a species is listed as threatened or endangered.

Under the settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., a proposed critical habitat rule will be issued next year, and will be subject to public comment and public hearings, Siegel said.