The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Monday that a seismic survey planned for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska this winter would have "no more than a negligible impact" on the numbers of polar bears in the region.
The finding was contained in a proposal by the agency to allow up to three incidents in which bears could be inadvertently harassed or disturbed during the survey work, which would take place over several months and is meant to detect signs of oil and gas reserves underground.
The agency said a few incidents of unintentional harassment, by, for example, coming too close to a bear and causing it to flee or interrupt feeding, would not affect survival. It added that it did not expect any bears to be physically injured or killed during the survey.
The proposal is to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, after which the public will have 30 days to comment. Approval after the comment period would remove a major hurdle to allowing the survey to begin early next year.
The project, which has been proposed by an Alaska Native village corporation, would involve heavy trucks and other equipment rolling across the snow-covered tundra in one part of the refuge, the coastal plain along the Beaufort Sea.
Polar bears are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. With climate change reducing the extent of sea ice, their main habitat, the subpopulation in the southern Beaufort Sea declined by about 40% from 2001 to 2010. There are thought to be about 900 animals in the subpopulation.
Sea-ice loss has meant that more of the bears come onto land for longer periods. Pregnant bears, in particular, often build winter dens in the snow of the coastal plain where they give birth to cubs and nurse them during their first few months of life.
Robert Dewey, a vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, said that detecting polar bears in their dens can be very difficult. "But that isn't stopping developers from pursuing oil and gas exploration there," he said in criticizing the Fish and Wildlife Service proposal.
Geoff York, senior director of conservation at Polar Bears International, a conservation group, said a quick review showed that the proposal "makes a lot of problematic assumptions."
Although the proposal says that death or injury of a polar bear is not expected, York said it concedes that there is a 21% chance of such an outcome. "I think most people would consider a 1 in 5 chance of injuring or killing a polar bear to be too much," he said.
The Arctic refuge, one of the last great expanses of unspoiled land in the U.S., has long been protected from oil and gas development. But in 2017, the Trump administration and Republicans who controlled Congress removed protections for 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain. Since then the White House has been pushing forward with a plan to allow oil and gas drilling there. The polar bear proposal is another sign that those efforts have accelerated in recent weeks following President Donald Trump's re-election defeat.
Last week, the Bureau of Land Management announced a plan to sell oil and gas leases in the coastal plain on Jan. 6, two weeks before the inauguration of Joe Biden, who opposes drilling in the refuge.
