Cook Inlet beluga whales (CIBW) are in peril. Only about 279 individuals remain and at their current rate of decline, the population faces a serious risk of functional extinction in about a decade. Cook Inlet belugas have been in decline for almost two decades and were designated as endangered in 2008. While the situation is distressing, it is sadly not surprising.

When a population is designated as endangered, the agency in charge of their management is required to develop a recovery plan that is supposed to guide decision-making with the aim of reversing decline and consequently improving the population’s conservation status. Five years ago, in December 2016, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency charged with management of CIBWS, published its Recovery Plan (RP). The RP identified and ranked ten potential threats to CIBW recovery and developed 66 recovery actions aimed at reducing these threats.

Since publication of the plan, the decline of the population has only accelerated and the window of time to make meaningful interventions to save Cook Inlet belugas is closing. It is evident that the status quo approach taken to managing CIBWs and their habitat is not working. The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) believes that the next three to five years is crucial and that NMFS must re-examine its approach to managing CIBWs and make dramatic changes to every aspect of its program, from permitting and pollution testing and stranding response to understanding the role of prey availability and climate change to the population.

To support NMFS in such an effort, EIA commissioned Broad Conservation LLC to analyze the effectiveness of NMFS’s Recovery Plan for the Cook Inlet Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas) and to make recommendations for how to improve management of the population to give Cook Inlet belugas the best shot at recovery. This report is a summary of Broad Conservation’s extensive analysis, key findings and detailed recommendations.

The report is divided into four sections. This first section provides context for the rest of the document and provides information about the Cook Inlet beluga whales (CIBWs), a description of their general habitat and critical habitat, a high-level overview of the CIBW Recovery Plan (RP) and the threats identified in the CIBW RP. The second section reviews the implementation and effectiveness of the RP based upon what has been learned about the species, its habitat, and threats since publication of the plan. Emphasis is placed on the more than 60 recovery actions, their priority ranking, their implementation status, and their ability to affect management change. Section three addresses various concerns surrounding cumulative and synergistic effects as impairments to CIBW, and looks at how NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) status quo process of issuing take may be contributing to this threat and hence, reducing the potential for the species to recover. The final section outlines recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the RP and management of the species for recovery. Supplemental information is provided in the appendices.

EIA urges NMFS to take urgent action to protect Cook Inlet belugas in line with the recommendations made in this report. We stand ready to work together to prioritize the recovery of these animals which are so special to the people of Cook Inlet.

Petition

In order to ensure stronger actions to protect Cook Inlet Belugas are implemented, we (along with our conservation partners) formally petitioned the Federal Government requesting a programmatic review of the permitting process for authorized harassment during various industrial and commercial activities. For far too long, there has been an excessive amount of permitted legal harassment that this already imperiled population has endured which has contributed to years of cumulative stressors impacting navigation, feeding, and reproduction. The petition requests that these harassment authorizations be capped at zero until the population can begin to recover.