Alaska Native groups sue federal government over polar bear habitat designation [View All]

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Source: Associated Press

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Native groups worried about losing tax revenues and royalties from oil development filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the federal government’s designation of critical habitat for threatened polar bears on the state’s oil-rich North Slope.

The Arctic Slope Regional Corp., North Slope Borough, Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and other groups took issue with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to designate more than 187,000 square miles — an area larger than California — as critical habitat for the bears, part of the recovery plan required by law for a species declared threatened or endangered.

The Department of the Interior is also named in the lawsuit, which says the government’s designation “will not address the primary threat to polar bears, the loss of sea ice due to climate change.”

The financial burden of the designation to the state, the North Slope Borough and the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. — a regional Native corporation — could reach in the billions of dollars, plaintiffs said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alaska-native-groups-sue-federal-government-over-polar-bear-habitat-designation/2011/05/13/AFXST52G_story.html