March 26, 2026 — A federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated protections for Arctic Alaska seals across a coastal and marine region stretching from the Central Bering Sea to the Beaufort Sea off the state’s northern coast.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal regulators acted properly in 2022 when they designated nearly 160 million acres as critical habitat for ringed seals and bearded seals. Both species are listed as threatened because of their dependence on Arctic sea ice. Designated critical habitat is required under the Endangered Species Act. It protects listed populations in the places they are most concentrated.
The appeals court ruling reverses a 2024 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason that struck down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s critical habitat designation as overly broad. And Wednesday’s ruling rejects arguments made by the state of Alaska that the critical habitat designated by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service was too vast to justify the negative impacts to oil development and other activities.
NMFS acted properly and in accordance with the law when it designated critical habitat for the seals, making the decisions after weighing impacts to activities like oil development, the ruling said.
The appeals court ruling said that the nearly 160 million acres of designated critical habitat area is large, but size is relative.
“To put that number into perspective, Alaska and its surrounding waters cover nearly half a billion acres—so even a small subset of the state may seem large in the abstract,” it said.