Why Preserving the Endangerment Finding Matters for Birds, People, and Local Economies

This month, the U.S. Environmental Safety Company (EPA) introduced a proposal to reverse its 2009 “Endangerment Discovering,” a landmark science-based determination underneath the Clear Air Act that discovered greenhouse fuel (GHG) emissions pose a severe risk to human well being and the atmosphere. That discovering, which adopted the Supreme Courtroom’s ruling in 2007 that GHGs are “air pollution” underneath the Act, serves as the premise for EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide, methane and different GHGs from key sources like energy vegetation, oil and fuel infrastructure, and vehicles and vans. In 2022, Congress amended the Act to reaffirm, because the Supreme Courtroom held, that GHGs are “air pollution” topic to regulation.

The Nationwide Audubon Society continues to help the Endangerment Discovering, which is predicated on an awesome consensus of scientists and public well being consultants. Because it was finalized, the Endangerment Discovering has served as a crucial basis for U.S. insurance policies that curb GHG emissions – a significant driver of local weather change, and probably the most vital threats to chook populations in the present day. If the discovering is weakened or eradicated, it will outcome within the elimination of federal GHG emission limits, growing dangers to birds and communities, whereas additionally creating regulatory uncertainty for companies. 

Why does this matter?

There’s an awesome scientific consensus that the shifting local weather threatens birds, ecosystems, communities, and our financial system. Since 1970, North America has misplaced greater than one in four birds, or roughly 3 billion birds. This yr, the 2025 U.S. State of the Birds Report revealed continued widespread declines in American chook populations, with 229 species requiring pressing conservation motion. The report discovered that a number of climate-related components are driving these declines together with elevated frequency of droughts and wildfires which have imperiled grassland and arid land chook species in addition to sea-level rise that has considerably contributed to the disappearance of crucial habitats for susceptible and endangered shorebird species. In 2019, Audubon’s Survival by Degrees report discovered that two-thirds of North American chook species are vulnerable to extinction until we take fast motion to handle these threats.

The well being dangers embrace elevated cases of respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses related to excessive temperatures. As well as, controlling GHG emissions helps scale back different dangerous air pollution which are typically emitted along with planet-warming gases. Most of the frequent pollution emitted alongside GHGs have been linked to elevated bronchial asthma charges, coronary heart illness, and varied cancers. Additional, shifts within the local weather brought on by GHG air pollution are increasing the ranges of tick-borne sicknesses and different illness pathogens, which influence communities, wildlife, agriculture, and pollinators. Respiratory sicknesses and air air pollution don’t simply influence individuals. Audubon knows that air pollution additionally has vital impacts on birds and their habitats. A 2017 study discovered the identical air air pollution that may be dangerous to people has dire penalties for birds, inflicting elevated respiratory sickness, elevated stress ranges, poor immune methods, lowered reproductive success, and inhabitants declines.

Ought to EPA get rid of the Endangerment Discovering, it will sideline a number of present local weather laws, together with current guidelines to limit pollution from coal and new natural gas-fired power plants and from vehicles and vans, in addition to efforts to curb methane emissions, placing birds and communities at better danger.

The urgency for local weather motion has by no means been so obvious. From fires raging throughout the western United States, to back-to-back hurricanes battering the southeast, to widespread and sudden flooding nationwide, the impacts of more and more unstable climate patterns are obvious, actual, and devastating to households and communities throughout the nation.

What’s subsequent?

Audubon is firmly dedicated to a science-based, nonpartisan strategy to defending birds, habitats, and communities from dangerous air pollution and rising local weather threats. We help insurance policies that restrict GHG emissions, assist drive funding in and deployment of renewable vitality, and promote nature-based local weather options that sequester carbon. EPA’s proposal to get rid of the Endangerment Discovering threatens to create financial and regulatory uncertainty, endanger the well being of birds and communities, and make it tougher to embrace the clear and inexpensive types of vitality wanted to deal with local weather change.

EPA is accepting public enter on the proposal to get rid of the Endangerment Discovering till September 22. Audubon urges its members to take motion and ask the EPA to rethink this modification.