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 resolution underneath the Clear Air Act that discovered greenhouse gasoline (GHG) emissions pose a critical menace to human well being and the surroundings. 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 gasoline infrastructure, and vehicles and vehicles. 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 assist the Endangerment Discovering, which relies on an amazing consensus of scientists and public well being consultants. Because it was finalized, the Endangerment Discovering has served as a essential basis for U.S. insurance policies that curb GHG emissions – a significant driver of local weather change, and one of the crucial important threats to hen populations right now. If the discovering is weakened or eradicated, it will end result within the elimination of federal GHG emission limits, rising dangers to birds and communities, whereas additionally creating regulatory uncertainty for companies. 

Why does this matter?

There may be an amazing 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 hen populations, with 229 species requiring pressing conservation motion. The report discovered that a number of climate-related elements are driving these declines together with elevated frequency of droughts and wildfires which have imperiled grassland and arid land hen species in addition to sea-level rise that has considerably contributed to the disappearance of essential habitats for weak and endangered shorebird species. In 2019, Audubon’s Survival by Degrees report discovered that two-thirds of North American hen species are susceptible to extinction until we take fast motion to handle these threats.

The well being dangers embrace elevated cases of respiratory and cardiovascular ailments related to excessive temperatures. As well as, controlling GHG emissions helps scale back different dangerous air pollution which might be typically emitted along with planet-warming gases. Lots of the frequent pollution emitted alongside GHGs have been linked to elevated bronchial asthma charges, coronary heart illness, and numerous cancers. Additional, shifts within the local weather brought on by GHG air pollution are increasing the ranges of tick-borne diseases and different illness pathogens, which impression communities, wildlife, agriculture, and pollinators. Respiratory diseases and air air pollution don’t simply impression folks. Audubon knows that air pollution additionally has important 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 techniques, lowered reproductive success, and inhabitants declines.

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

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 method to defending birds, habitats, and communities from dangerous air pollution and rising local weather threats. We assist 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 remove 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 remove the Endangerment Discovering till September 22. Audubon urges its members to take motion and ask the EPA to rethink this variation.