Fish and Wildlife Service finalizes five-year Arctic oil rule covering polar bear and walrus disturbance

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has finalized a five-year rule allowing oil and gas companies working along Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast to be authorized for the incidental, unintentional take of small numbers of polar bears and Pacific walruses. The agency’s final rule was scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on October 19, 2026, and remains in effect through October 19, 2031.

The regulations were issued under the Marine Mammal Protection Act at the request of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, the agency said. They cover year-round exploration, development, production and transportation work in the Beaufort Sea and on the adjacent northern coast of Alaska, and exclude lands within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The agency said the rule continues similar regulations that took effect in 2021 and ran through August 2026.

The rule does not itself approve any project. Companies must request a letter of authorization for specific activities, and the agency said it will issue those letters on request if the activities match the rule’s descriptions and its mitigation and monitoring requirements. Eligible requesters include the association’s member companies and 8 Star Alaska, LLC, along with their affiliates, contractors and partners.

Fish and Wildlife said its findings are that the total takings will affect small numbers of animals, will have a negligible impact on the species or stocks, and will not have an unmitigable adverse impact on the availability of the animals for subsistence use by Alaska Natives.

What the industry estimated

The association’s request estimated the Level B harassment of 123 polar bears over the five years, made up of 120 surface bears and 3 denning bears, according to the rule. That works out to an annual average of 24 harassments of surface bears. The request put the chance of a Level A harassment, which means injury, at less than one over the five-year period and did not anticipate any lethal take.

The agency’s own text describes how deaths could still occur. In its section on lethal take, the rule states that human activity can kill polar bears in the most serious interactions, giving vehicle collisions and running over an unknown den as examples. It also says that if a female bear were disturbed during denning and abandoned cubs too young to survive alone, incidental lethal take of the cubs would occur. For walruses, it says a vessel strike or a human-caused stampede at a haulout could kill animals.

A change in how the agency counts

The rule says it marks a shift in approach from the 2021 to 2026 regulations and from the proposed version. The agency acknowledged that its predictive models produce take estimates that have exceeded the number of events with observable biological consequences, and said the models are more likely to overestimate than underestimate. It said it weighed those model results together with the association’s own estimates and qualitative factors as the best available scientific evidence, and concluded the approach is permissible under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The agency said the model was not part of its findings in the Beaufort Sea regulations issued between 1993 and 2016 because it did not yet exist, and was first used in the 2021 regulations.

The final text also changed several measures from the proposal. It now asks vessels to keep the “maximum distance practicable,” defined as 805 meters (0.5 miles) or greater, after the requester called the earlier wording too vague. A third aerial infrared survey for polar bear dens, which the proposal had included as an added mitigation measure, was removed after the agency concluded it was not practicable.

Public comment and reaction

The agency said it received 85,589 comments on the proposed rule before the comment period closed on April 8, 2026, counting each person who signed a multi-signature submission. Commenters included the State of Alaska, the North Slope Borough, advocacy groups and members of the public.

Common Dreams reported on the rule on October 16 and described it as shielding oil and gas companies from liability for unintentional killings of the animals. The same outlet reported that Interior plans to let companies carry out certain wintertime operations in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska without National Environmental Policy Act reviews.