Trump plan for Western Arctic threatens to worsen climate crisis
The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is a vitally important area for Nuiqsut and other North Slope communities that depend on its diverse wildlife, including caribou, birds and fish.
A science-based plan that protected high-value wildlife habitat and subsistence resources that are vital to local Indigenous communities is being replaced to put corporate greed ahead of people.
The Trump administration announced today that it will replace the balanced and science-based Integrated Activity Plan for the Western Arctic with an aggressively pro-drilling version implemented during the president’s first term.
The plan attempts to dictate management of the 23.6 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is the America’s largest tract of public land and the cultural homeland and subsistence area for Alaska Native communities that depend on its robust, wild ecosystems that support caribou, geese, loons, broad whitefish, salmon, polar bears, bowhead whales and millions of migratory birds. This plan would open up more than 80 percent of the reserve to destructive oil and gas leasing and development.
In response, The Wilderness Society’s senior manager for Alaska, Matt Jackson, released the following statement:
“This is another step in the Trump administration’s reckless effort to sell out our most valuable national public lands to the oil industry in the midst of the climate crisis.
“They are scrapping a plan that is based on a robust body of science and traditional ecological knowledge that protects high-value wildlife habitat and subsistence resources that are vital to local Indigenous communities across Alaska, and replacing it with a strategy that puts corporate greed ahead of people.”
The Arctic is ground zero for climate change, where temperatures are rising roughly four times faster than other regions of the planet. Villages are eroding into the sea, thawing permafrost is making infrastructure insecure and food sources are disappearing.
Further extraction and burning of oil stored in the Western Arctic – and the release of billions of pounds of carbon from thawing soil and tundra – would have devastating and irreparable consequences, and exacerbate climate change, harming not only the Arctic but all of America.
