Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The court gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service more time to act in accordance with the court's September 21, 2018 decision.

The federal district court for the Northern District of California vacated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS’s) withdrawal in 2016 of a proposal to list the Pacific fisher as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Although the plaintiffs cited climate change as a threat to the species in their complaint and motion papers, the court’s decision did not address climate change and remanded the matter to the FWS based on inadequate treatment of the threat of toxicants and on “flawed logic regarding population stability.” The court noted that it did not reach the plaintiffs’ “other criticisms regarding the Service’s treatment of other stressors” but said that “[t]his order, however, acknowledges that plaintiffs have raised plausible criticisms.” The court suggested that on remand the FWS “consider and address those further points made by plaintiffs as well.”

The Center for Biological Diversity and three other organizations filed a lawsuit in the federal district court for the Northern District of California challenging the withdrawal of the proposed designation of a distinct population segment of the fisher (the Pacific fisher) as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The complaint described Pacific fishers as “slender mammals with long, bushy tails, closely related to minks, martens, and wolverines.” The plaintiffs charged that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had “inexplicably and illegally abandoned years of work” and that the withdrawal was contrary to the best scientific and commercial data available. The plaintiffs cited climate change as one of the threats to the Pacific fisher and its habitat. In their notice of intent to sue, the plaintiffs said that FWS had arbitrarily misconstrued uncertainty regarding the effects of climate change on fisher habitat as evidence that climate change was not contributing to significant habitat loss.