Alaska, North Slope Borough sue to overturn ringed seal listing

The State of Alaska and North Slope Borough filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Anchorage on Nov. 16, 2022, seeking to remove the Arctic ringed seal from the Endangered Species Act list. The case puts state and borough officials against NOAA Fisheries over a species that North Slope villages have long tracked as part of sea-ice travel, marine hunting and changing coastal conditions.

NOAA Fisheries listed the Arctic ringed seal as threatened in 2012. In its February 2024 five-year status review, the agency kept the Arctic, Okhotsk and Baltic ringed seal subspecies classified as threatened and the Ladoga subspecies classified as endangered. NOAA describes ringed seals as the smallest and most common Arctic seal, found in all seasonally ice-covered seas of the Northern Hemisphere.

The federal review pointed to the biggest habitat threats as decreasing ice habitat suitable for whelping and nursing, along with increased predation risk. That finding sits at the center of the dispute in Alaska, where ringed seals are tied to sea ice and snow cover and where the legal status of the species can affect how federal agencies evaluate habitat, marine activity and development proposals in Arctic waters.

The state and borough had already tried in 2020 to persuade the National Marine Fisheries Service to reverse the threatened designation. That effort failed, and the issue stayed in court. In July 2025, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed NMFS’s 2024 decision rejecting efforts to strip Arctic ringed seals of Endangered Species Act protections.

The litigation also sits inside a wider Arctic fight over endangered species rules and critical habitat. In March 2026, the 9th Circuit reinstated critical habitat designations for ringed and bearded seals after earlier litigation, with nearly 160 million acres designated as critical habitat. State officials have argued that such decisions interfere with oil development, while federal regulators have continued to treat ice-dependent seal habitat as central to the species’ survival.

For North Slope Borough leaders, the lawsuit is as much about jurisdiction and livelihoods as it is about wildlife. A successful challenge could change how future oil and gas, shipping and coastal-use decisions are reviewed in the Arctic. If the courts leave the listing in place, the threatened designation remains another layer of federal oversight in a region where subsistence needs, local governance and offshore development are already closely intertwined.