Natural Resources Defense Council v. Ross

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Healthy Gulf filed an Endangered Species Act citizen suit seeking an order to compel the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to make a final decision on whether to list the Gulf of Mexico whale as endangered. The plaintiffs alleged that NMFS’s 12-month finding and proposal to list the species as endangered—which were published in December 2016 in response to NRDC’s listing petition—identified 27 threats to the whale’s survival. The plaintiffs asserted that NMFS was required to take further action within a year of the publication of the proposed listing decision. The plaintiffs alleged that the whale faced numerous anthropogenic threats and that its small population size and limited range “increase[d] its vulnerability to extinction from … environmental processes like climate change.”