Fossil-fuel drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) could put polar bears at risk of “lethal” oil spills, new research suggests.
Former president Donald Trump passed a law to enable drilling in the refuge in 2017.
This followed decades of fierce debate between Democrats and Republicans about whether to allow extractive activities in the 7.7m-hectare (19m-acre) expanse, a haven for wildlife sitting on top of an estimated 11bn barrels of oil.
On his first day in office, US president Joe Biden suspended drilling inside the ANWR pending a review. In 2023, his administration cancelled the seven oil and gas licences issued for the reserve under Trump.
However, by law, the Biden administration is still required to hold a second lease sale for the ANWR by December 2024, unless Congress is able to pass legislation undoing the provision set out in Trump’s tax bill.
And with Trump pledging to “drill, baby, drill” if reelected to power later this year, a Republican victory in the next US election would likely see the refuge opened up for oil and gas extraction once again.
The new study, published in Biological Conservation, uses modelling to examine how a series of “worst-case scenario” oil spills could impact polar bears that use the refuge to raise young and feast on bowhead whale carcasses.
The research finds that a serious oil spill inside ANWR could expose up to 38 bears to lethal levels of oil and dozens more to harmful levels.
The risk of exposure to oil spills could be worsened by climate change, which is forcing polar bears to spend greater amounts of time on land in summer as sea ice melts away, the study lead author tells Carbon Brief.
Wild north
Republicans and Democrats have been at loggerheads about whether to drill for oil in the ANWR since the 1970s.
It is located in Alaska’s north slope, directly adjacent to a vast expanse of land that is a hotbed for oil and gas activity (see chart below). This activity includes the highly controversial Willow oil project, which was given final approval by Biden in 2023.
At present, there are currently around 2,000 oil and hazardous substance spills each year in Alaska, in areas where extractive activities already take place.
In 1989, Alaska faced one of the worst environmental disasters in US history when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground, spilling 11m gallons of oil.
Conservationists have fought to protect the ANWR, a wilderness supporting migratory caribou, wolves, all three North American bear species and hundreds of bird species. The refuge is also the home of the Indigenous Gwich’in and Iñupiat people.
But Republicans have long called for the ANWR to be opened up for drilling. According to Outside Magazine, Republicans have attempted to pass laws to enable drilling inside the ANWR nearly 50 times.
They were finally successful in 2017, when Trump passed a tax bill requiring oil and gas licensing rounds to be held for an area inside the ANWR.
However, on his first day in office in 2021, Biden issued an executive order suspending drilling in the ANWR pending an environmental review.
In 2023, interior secretary Deb Haaland cancelled the seven oil and gas licences issued in the ANWR under Trump, arguing the lease sale was “seriously flawed” for a number of reasons, including failure to “properly quantify downstream greenhouse gas emissions” from the projects.
Despite these efforts, the Biden administration is still required by law to conduct a second lease sale for the ANWR by December 2024, unless Congress is able to pass legislation undoing the provision set out in Trump’s tax bill.
Biden’s presidential campaign promised “no new drilling, period” on federal land and waters, but since entering office he has several times been compelled to hold new licensing rounds in various locations by Congress or the courts.
Dr Ryan Wilson, a wildlife biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and lead author of the new study, says his research could help to inform decisions about issuing licences within the ANWR. He tells Carbon Brief:
“There is still an opportunity to inform where development and infrastructure would be allowed for the upcoming lease sale.”
Bear behaviour
For the study, the researchers used modelling to simulate how a series of “worst-case scenario” oil spills could affect polar bears resting in the ANWR.
Polar bears are known to be “especially susceptible to oiling” from spills, the researchers say. This is because oil can damage their fur, leaving them unable to thermoregulate in their harshly cold habitat.
According to the researchers, the ANWR provides an “important habitat” for polar bears from the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation, a group of around 900 bears that are currently in decline.
The ANWR hosts the highest density of polar bear dens in the US.
When female polar bears are pregnant, they dig dens in the snow, where they give birth and care for their cubs for the first few months of their life. It is the “most vulnerable period in the polar bear’s life cycle”, according to Polar Bears International. Wilson tells Carbon Brief:
“We’re not sure why maternal polar bears are drawn to the ANWR coastal plain for denning, but records of denning events indicate that over the last 30-40 years there is a higher density of dens there than elsewhere on the northern coast of Alaska.”
The ANWR coastal plain also provides “important resting areas” and a “movement corridor” for bears during autumn, when sea ice is near its lowest levels, the researchers say.
At this time, polar bears feast on the remains of bowhead whale carcasses left behind by hunters from Indigenous communities.
To understand how oil spills might affect polar bears, the researchers simulated spills from three locations along the north-western coast of the ANWR coastal plain: Brownlow Point, Anderson Point and Camden Bay. (These sites are represented with hazard symbols on the map below.)
These regions have the highest oil potential – and are also areas where polar bears come ashore to feed on whale carcasses, according to the researchers.
For each spill site, the researchers simulated an underwater pipeline release of 4,800 barrels of oil every day for six days, totalling 28,000 barrels. They then tracked the path of the oil spill for 50 days.
They simulated the oil spills in autumn, when the maximum number of bears would be using the ANWR.
To estimate how many bears would be exposed, they overlaid trajectories of simulated polar bear movements with the oil spills.
They found that a spill at Brownlow Point would be the most deadly, exposing up to 38 bears to lethal levels of oil. Meanwhile, a spill at Anderson Point would expose up to 28 bears, while a spill at Camden Bay would expose up to 19 bears.
All three of the spills would also expose up to 50-60 bears to sub-lethal levels of oil each week, the researchers find.
Mounting risks
While the simulations track the movements of oil and polar bears over 50 days, they do not consider any efforts that might be made to clean up the oil and take bears to safety, the authors say.
Because of this, they describe their results as a “worst-case scenario that could help managers and oil producers prepare for the most impactful scenario they might encounter with an active oil spill”.
Wilson adds to Carbon Brief that the risk to bears from oil spills has increased because of climate change, which is causing sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean to rapidly shrink, forcing bears to spend more time on the land surrounding the ocean, including the ANWR:
“The primary risk to polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation is the loss of sea ice habitat due to climate change. The loss of sea ice is causing more polar bears to come on shore in summer and autumn for longer periods of time, which can lead to more human-polar bear conflicts, putting both bears and people at risk. This increased time on land also leads to greater risk to polar bears from an oil spill in the region.”
The study is “well-conceived and significant” says Prof Andrew Derocher, a polar bear researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, who was not involved. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The risk to polar bears from an oil spill remains an ongoing concern and for a population like the one in the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation, which has already declined in abundance due to climate change, the risk of additional mortality from an oil spill is a serious concern. An oil spill in Alaska as modelled would clearly have significant negative impacts on polar bears there.”
One aspect not covered in the study is how an oil spill would likely affect polar bear prey, including ringed and bearded seals, he says:
“If there were population-level impacts on the seals, this could be an additive impact that would further slow polar bear population recovery. In addition, there is a very high likelihood that polar bears would feed on dead and dying wildlife that were oiled in a spill – specifically, seals, walrus, possibly belugas and birds. Polar bears are consummate scavengers and this secondary form of impact isn’t addressed by this paper.”
He adds the study raises the important issue of being prepared for the environmental impacts of an oil spill in the Arctic:
“I believe that no jurisdiction is prepared for a significant oil spill in the Arctic. Our ability to respond is limited by preparedness, infrastructure and staff.”
The post Alaska refuge drilling could threaten polar bears with ‘lethal’ oil spills appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Alaska refuge drilling could threaten polar bears with ‘lethal’ oil spills
Australia’s new environmental standards are supposed to protect wildlife. Right now, they don’t.
We have one of the worst mammal extinction rates in the world. We’ve already lost 39 species, including the Christmas Island Shrew and the desert rat-kangaroo, while iconic species like the Hairy-Nosed Wombat, Pygmy blue whale and Swift Parrot continue to slide towards extinction. Forests are still being bulldozed at an alarming rate. Rivers and reefs are under serious pressure.
Fixing this sorry state of affairs was why the Federal Government promised to fix Australia’s broken national nature laws—a promise that culminated in the nature law reforms passed late last year.
A big part of these reforms is the creation of new “National Environmental Standards” — rules intended to guide decisions on projects that could damage nature.
But the Government’s latest draft standards—open for consultation until May 29th—fall dangerously short.
Instead of setting clear environmental guardrails, the draft rules risk making it easier for damaging projects to get approved, while nature continues to decline. Legal experts are warning that unless the standards are changed, they could weaken protections rather than strengthen them.
So what are these standards, exactly?
The new standards are a centrepiece of major reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), which were passed late last year and are designed to fix a broken environmental regulatory system. They are meant to set clear rules for what environmental protection should actually look like.
In simple terms, they’re supposed to answer questions like:
- What measures should developers be made to put in place to protect threatened species?
- How do we ensure the most important habitats and natural places are not hacked away, “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”-style, from ongoing development proposals?
- When should a project simply not go ahead?
- What rules should states follow if they’re in charge of assessing development projects?
- How do we make sure nature is actually improving, not just declining more slowly?
If designed and implemented properly, these standards could become the backbone of strong, effective reformed nature laws.
But right now, they leave huge loopholes open.
The biggest problem: process over outcomes
The biggest problem with the draft standards is that they focus too heavily on whether companies follow a process—not whether nature is genuinely protected in the end. That might sound technical, but it has real-world consequences.
Imagine a company wants to clear critical habitat for a threatened species. Under a strong system, the key question should be: Will this project cause unacceptable or significant environmental harm?
But under the current draft standards, if the company follows the required steps and paperwork, the project could still be considered acceptable — even if the damage to nature is clear.
This is deeply ineffective. Destruction that checks bureaucratic check-boxes is still destruction. The standards should enforce the protection of nature—not just the ticking of procedural boxes.
A smaller definition of habitat could leave wildlife exposed
Another alarming change in the draft standards is the narrowing of how “habitat” is defined, which could have serious consequences for wildlife protection.
Habitat is more than just the exact spot where an animal is seen sleeping, nesting or feeding today; we need to think more holistically about habitat as a connected network of ecosystems that species may rely on to survive, including breeding grounds, migration corridors, areas used during drought or fire, and places they may need to move to as the climate changes.
But the draft standards effectively shrink the areas considered important enough to protect by defining habitat as only very small areas that if destroyed would certainly send the species extinct, rather than habitat which maintains and restores healthy populations able to thrive well into the future.
For animals already under pressure from habitat destruction and climate change, protecting only the bare minimum is a dangerous approach. In practice, that could mean that places which are essential for threatened species to recover and survive long term are destroyed just because they are not classified under the standards as ‘habitat’—a lose-lose outcome for biodiversity and the Australian government’s nature protection goals.
Offsets are still doing too much heavy lifting
Australians have heard the promise before: “Yes, this area will be damaged — but it’ll be offset somewhere else.” In practice, environmental offsets have severely failed to replace what was lost.
You can’t instantly recreate a centuries-old forest. You can’t quickly rebuild complex wildlife habitat. And some ecosystems simply cannot be replaced once destroyed. Yet the draft standards still rely heavily on offsets rather than prioritising avoiding harm in the first place.
The standards must reduce their reliance on offsets, and instead prioritise actual habitat protection. Because once extinction happens, there’s no offset for it.
Australia cannot afford another backwards step on nature
The Albanese Government came to office promising to end Australia’s extinction crisis and repair national nature laws. But this will be a broken promise if the huge loopholes in the National Environmental Standards aren’t addressed.
Right now, Australia is losing wildlife and ecosystems faster than they can recover. Scientists have warned for years that incremental change is no longer enough.
Strong standards could help turn things around by:
- stopping destruction in critical habitat,
- setting firm limits on environmental harm,
- requiring genuine recovery for nature,
- and making decision-makers accountable for real outcomes rather than process.
If the Government locks in rules that prioritise process over protection, Australia risks entrenching the very system that caused the crisis in the first place.
What needs to change?
The Government still has time to fix the draft standards before they are finalised over the next month.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the government to:
- ensure decisions are based on outcomes, not just process
- ensure that all important habitat is protected, not just narrow areas
- ensuring that death-by-a-thousand-cuts is avoided by considering the “cumulative impacts” of multiple projects in a region
- ensuring offsets are only used as an absolute last resort
Australians were promised stronger nature laws—not more loopholes. Australia’s wildlife cannot afford another missed opportunity.You can help ensure the Federal Government’s final standards put to parliament are as strong as possible by putting in a quick submission here.
Climate Change
Duke University Plans a Data Center It Says Will Boost ‘Environmental Responsibility and Sustainability’
The small project is underway at Central Campus, with room for expansion. Its energy usage could complicate the university’s climate goals.
DURHAM, N.C.—Duke University plans to build a small data center at Central Campus, potentially the first of several similar-size projects, which has raised questions among some faculty about whether the energy- and water-intensive endeavors could derail the institution’s climate commitments.
The UN General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a “historic” resolution calling on countries to comply with their climate obligations, as outlined in a landmark advisory opinion issued last year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Last July, in the opinion first requested by the Pacific island state of Vanuatu, the world’s top court ruled that harming the climate by increasing fossil fuel production may constitute an “international wrongful act”. This could result in affected countries claiming compensation from those responsible, the court said.
To follow up on the ICJ ruling, a dozen nations led by Vanuatu submitted a proposal to the UN’s main deliberative body to recognise the advisory opinion and identify ways of implementing it.
Several large oil-producing nations mounted a late push to weaken the text by introducing last-minute amendments, but the General Assembly rejected those and adopted the resolution with 141 countries in favour at a plenary session in New York.
The resolution urges countries to implement measures to cut carbon emissions, including by tripling renewable energy capacity, “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”, and phasing out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.
It also requests the UN Secretary-General to draft a report “containing ways to advance compliance with all obligations in relation to the court’s findings” by next year’s UN General Assembly in September 2027.
Pacific islands celebrate “historic” resolution
The group of Pacific island nations, which led the diplomatic push for the resolution, as well as Latin American nations and the European Union, celebrated its adoption as a “historic” moment, while some countries noted the persistence of diverging views.
Belize’s UN representative Janine Coye-Felson said in a statement on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) that the General Assembly resolution, as well as the ICJ advisory opinion, are important because “climate change is not governed only” by the Paris Agreement, but that “climate justice requires the application of the full breath of international law”.
“When future generations look back at this moment, they will ask whether we rose to meet the defining crisis of our time with the full force of international law. Today, this General Assembly answers: yes,” she told the plenary.
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The EU said in a statement during the session that, with the adoption of the resolution, countries are moving beyond “simply recognising” the ICJ’s work and instead “actively upholding the legal integrity” of the multilateral system by seeking to implement the court’s recommendations.
Yet the bloc also warned the process that follows must not “seek to establish new mechanisms or engage in any determination of state responsibility”, referring in particular to the upcoming report by the Secretary-General. Earlier drafts of the resolution contained proposals to establish a register of climate-driven loss and damage and a dedicated compensation mechanism, but these were removed during negotiations on the text.
France’s ambassador to the UN, Jérôme Bonnafont, highlighted the resolution’s provision to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and said “science clearly establishes their role in climate change”. The recent increase in oil and gas prices, which have soared because of the war in Iran, “underscores the cost vulnerability of this dependence”, he added.
Push-back by oil-producing nations
Some oil-producing countries – among them the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – were critical of the new resolution, arguing that it creates “quasi-binding” obligations from an advisory opinion that should be non-binding, and rejected the request for a report from the Secretary-General.
“This is a direct duplication of work that is being done at the [UN climate convention],” said Russia’s delegate. “Creating a parallel process will waste resources, will undermine the fragile consensus at the conference of the parties and will lead to the fragmentation of the climate regime.”
In an effort to weaken the resolution, a group of seven oil-producing Middle Eastern states – including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran – tabled four last-minute amendments proposing to delete certain paragraphs and softening the language on the obligations of states.
Webinar: From Santa Marta to Bonn – where next for the fossil fuel transition?
In response, Pacific island nations said these amendments sought to “reopen provisions that were [the] subject of extensive negotiation”, while the EU added that they were “difficult to reconcile with the spirit of cooperation”. They were all rejected in a series of votes.
The US, for its part, described the resolution as “highly problematic” and denied the obligation of preventing climate harm beyond its borders, as well as the assertion that climate change is an “unprecedented civilizational challenge”. The country urged others to vote against the resolution.
India, which abstained, said the text failed to address the need for climate finance flows from developed to developing countries, which is “a serious omission”. The Indian delegate pointed to the absence of the term “climate finance” in the text, which “deserves more attention in a resolution that deals with the obligations of states”.
“Turning point in accountability”, activists say
WWF’s climate chief and former COP president Manuel Pulgar-Vidal said the General Assembly’s vote was a step forward that “raises the pressure on all states to act in line with their obligations”.
Rebecca Brown, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said the UN resolution shows that “multilateralism works” and with it, countries “carry the ICJ’s historic ruling forward as a roadmap for climate action and accountability”.
“By acting together, we can prevent further climate harm, in line with science and the law, by speeding up a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels, protecting climate-vulnerable communities, and advancing climate justice,” she added in a statement.
Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change – a group of young people who first made the push for an advisory opinion from the ICJ – said “the world has not only reaffirmed that ruling, but committed to making it a reality”.
“This must be a turning point in accountability for damaging the climate. Communities on the frontlines, like in the Pacific, have been waiting far too long and continue to pay too high a price for the actions of others,” he said. “The journey of this idea from classrooms in the Pacific to The Hague and the United Nations gives us continued hope that when people organise, the world can be moved to act.”
The post UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court
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