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Looking back on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) after 50-plus years of implementation reveals a substantial influence on conservation science. The ESA catalyzed science to support listing decisions, species status assessments, a shared understanding of species’ habitats and ranges, threat assessment and recovery planning.

However, rising threats to species and limited resources to support recovery have resulted in increasing numbers of imperiled species. Prioritizing investment in biodiversity management requires more interdisciplinary approaches. Emerging research is shifting from objective solution seeking to supporting complex listing decisions based on increasingly complex genetic data to nontraditional management measures like assisted migration.

Conservation science has evolved to focus on scales beyond a single species, leading to both new challenges and opportunities in how the ESA can support ecosystem and landscape-scale conservation. The importance of increasingly inclusive management also presents challenges and opportunities for more integrative research to support ESA decision-making.

Full paper available here: doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102723-064002

Recently, numerous legislative, regulatory, and budgetary proposals would undermine the strength of the ESA to protect and restore imperiled species.

Scientists have written a letter calling on Congress to commit to protecting species threatened with extinction by upholding the ESA and the science-based framework that underpins it.

Scientists can read and sign the letter here: https://defenders-cci.org/sign-on/safeguard_esa/

We strongly oppose and caution against the proposal to rescind the regulatory definition of “harm”, defined as “an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding, or sheltering” (50 C.F.R. § 17.3, pertaining to the US FWS, and similarly 50 C.F.R. § 222.102 for NMFS). Rescinding this definition goes strongly against the original intent of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 – an overwhelmingly popular law that passed the Senate unanimously and remains a landmark for demonstrating the United States’ commitment to protecting our natural environment for generations to come – and will result in the loss of threatened and endangered species. We reject the notion that the regulatory definition of harm is inconsistent with the best meaning of the statute. Below, we highlight how the agencies’ (United States Fish & Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service) proposed change would have undue consequences for the protection and conservation of threatened and endangered species, which is wholly inconsistent with the original intent of the Endangered Species Act and goes against decades of consistent, bipartisan interpretation and implementation of the law. Specifically, we highlight how:

• The proposal would strip essential habitat protections from hundreds of threatened and endangered species.
• The change contradicts the stated purpose of the ESA to conserve “ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend”.
• Impacts to habitat directly injure wildlife in ways that prevent endangered species’ recovery. Removing habitat protections would undermine the ESA’s ability to recover species.
• The agencies are improperly avoiding NEPA review, which is required given the threats such a change poses to threatened and endangered species.
• Rescinding the current definition of harm would undermine decades of conservation plans and policy and undermine one of our nation’s most successful and popular environmental laws.