HONOLULU (CN) — A federal judge in Hawaii ruled Thursday that the National Marine Fisheries Service had wrongly denied climate change protections to 20 threatened coral species in the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean, even though the service had previously identified climate change as the main threat to these corals’ survival.
U.S. District Judge Micah Smith granted partial summary judgement to the Center for Biological Diversity, which petitioned for the corals’ protection in 2020 and sued the service in 2023 for regulations to address climate change, a ban on international trade, and protections against local threats like development and poor water quality.
“I’m delighted by this court ruling because it underlines climate change’s overwhelming threat to imperiled corals,” said Emily Jeffers, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve lost half of the world’s coral reefs in the past 40 years, and if we don’t act quickly the rest could disappear forever by the end of this century.”
Smith determined that the service failed to explain properly why it wouldn’t protect corals from climate change.
The agency had claimed such regulations would have “limited effectiveness,” but Smith found this explanation inadequate, especially since climate change poses the greatest threat to these species. The court labeled this decision “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered the agency to reconsider.
“In reaching this conclusion, it is worth noting what NMFS did not say. NMFS did not conclude that it lacked the legal authority to adopt Section 4(d) regulations to address climate change. Nor did it say that it was unaware of what Section 4(d) regulations it might adopt to accomplish those ends, or that the center’s petition suffered from a lack of clarity,” Smith wrote.
The judge similarly overturned the service’s decision not to issue regulations protecting Caribbean coral species from local threats, finding that the agency also provided no proper justification for this choice.
“Although the localized threats may not be as sprawling and daunting a challenge as climate change, it remains insufficient to merely assert that regulations would have a limited effect. And NMFS did not offer an explanation for why that would be the case,” Smith said, noting that the service has itself in the past noted the effectiveness of a wide array of conservation measures against such threats.
However, Smith agreed with the service’s decision not to ban coral collection and trade. The agency had explained that such prohibitions wouldn’t significantly help conservation efforts because collection and trade pose a relatively low threat and coral species would be difficult to identify for non-expert law enforcement.
The judge also supported the service’s decision against additional regulations for Indo-Pacific corals, accepting the argument that many of these corals exist outside U.S. waters and are already subject to collection and trade prohibitions throughout the Caribbean.
The case now goes back to the service, which must reconsider the center’s petition regarding climate change regulations and protections for the threatened coral species found in Florida, the Caribbean, and the Indo-Pacific region. The court did not set a deadline for completing this review. The service initially rejected this petition in 2021.
“Coral reefs are the backbone of a healthy ocean, so we just can’t risk losing them,” Jeffers said. “Anyone who’s ever snorkeled near a healthy reef knows that they’re a magical cacophony of color and life. But they also provide crucial habitat for fish and help protect our coasts from storms. We need the Trump administration to recognize the threats to corals and the coastal communities that rely on them.”
This ruling follows other recent court decisions emphasizing that federal agencies must better protect marine environments. In August 2024, a Maryland federal judge invalidated a federal assessment about protecting endangered marine species from Gulf of Mexico drilling, citing insufficient consideration of risks like oil spills and vessel strikes. In the last days of his term, former President Joe Biden issued a permanent ban on oil drilling in part of the area, now renamed by President Donald Trump as the Gulf of America.
