Description: Lawsuit alleging that authorization and management of lobster fishery violated federal law due to impacts on North American right whales.
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Center for Biological Diversity v. Ross
Case Documents:
Filing Date Type File Action Taken Summary 01/18/2018 Complaint Download Complaint filed. Lawsuit Alleged That Management of Lobster Fishery Violated Federal Laws Protecting North American Right Whales. Three non-profit groups filed a lawsuit in the federal district court for the District of Columbia alleging that the authorization and management of the American lobster fishery violated the Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and Administrative Procedure Act due to impacts on endangered North American right whales. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued a biological opinion in 2014 determining that ongoing operations of the fishery were likely to kill or seriously injure more than three right whales every year but that fishery was not likely to jeopardize the right whales’ continued existence. The complaint alleged, among other things, that the NMFS’s jeopardy analysis was “patently unlawful” and had “improperly consider[ed] only the isolated share of responsibility for impacts to right whales from operation of the fishery, rather than adding the direct and indirect effects of operation of the fishery to all other activities and influences that affect the status of the species,” which include threats from climate change. -
Conservation Law Foundation v. Ross
Case Documents:
Filing Date Type File Action Taken Summary 02/07/2018 Complaint Download Complaint filed. Lawsuit Challenging Management of Lobster Fishery Said Agency Failed to Consider Fishery’s Effects Added to Baseline Affected by Climate Change and Other Factors. Conservation Law Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging the National Marine Fisheries Service’s ongoing authorization and management of the American lobster fishery for failing to prevent jeopardy and unlawful takes of North Atlantic right whales in violation of the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The complaint alleged, among other claims, that a 2014 biological opinion concerning the effects of continued operations of the lobster fishery on endangered and threatened species, including the right whale, was arbitrary and capricious. One of the shortcomings alleged in the complaint was the biological opinion’s failure to add the fishery’s direct and indirect effects (entanglement in fishing gear was alleged to be the “single greatest threat” to right whale survival) to the environmental baseline and the cumulative effects on the species. Climate change was among the factors discussed in the environmental baseline and cumulative effects analysis as potentially having a negative influence on right whale recovery.