Lawsuit Challenges Massive Oil and Gas Sale Over Harms to Western Arctic Public Lands and the Climate

Two conservation groups are suing today over a massive oil and gas lease sale in the Western Arctic that was recently announced by the Bureau of Land Management.

The lease sale encompasses approximately 5.5 million acres across more than 600 tracts within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The sale threatens to bring harmful oil drilling and industrialization to public lands in Alaska that are equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey. The BLM says it will accept bids from oil companies until March 16 and announce sale results via livestream on March 18.

The tracts offered to oil companies for leasing are ecologically and culturally important lands and include nearly all the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area and a large portion of the Colville River – critically important areas for wildlife and subsistence that have long been protected from oil and gas extraction.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth U.S., represented by Earthjustice, are challenging the lease sale and the underlying management plan, or Integrated Activity Plan, that opens 18.5 million acres within the 23-million-acre Reserve to potential oil and gas drilling and infrastructure. The groups filed an amended and supplemented complaint today in Alaska’s federal court that restarts a paused 2020 lawsuit from the first Trump administration.

The groups assert the federal government is failing to comply with laws requiring it to protect significant ecological and cultural values in the Reserve, accurately assess and consider impacts to the environment, and consider alternatives to its leasing plan.

The scheduled lease sale, the first of five mandated by the 2025 budget reconciliation act, is unlawful and far more destructive than what is required by the act. The budget act does not specify which lands within the Reserve should be leased and gives the DOI discretion to not offer leases in more sensitive areas.

The administration’s aggressive plans for Arctic oil and gas development will destroy wildlife habitat, worsen climate change, and further imperil wildlife populations that are protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In January, the groups sent a notice of intent to sue the Bureau of Land Management and the Secretary of the Interior over the government’s failure to protect Chukchi and Beaufort Sea polar bears, which are listed as threatened under the ESA. Those noticed claims, along with other ESA claims that don’t require notice, will be part of the lawsuit. The lawsuit also addresses threats to other wildlife, including globally important populations of migratory birds and the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd, which is important to nearby communities for their food security and continued ways of life.

“The Trump administration is inviting big oil companies to go wild and wreak havoc in one of the last, large, intact natural areas on the planet,” said Rebecca Noblin, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Our climate can’t sustain more dirty fossil fuel extraction and Western Arctic wildlife can’t withstand this industrial onslaught. Our priceless public lands are being auctioned off for Big Oil to destroy. We’ll fight these unlawful actions and work to ensure that the polar bears, caribou, and migratory birds who call the Western Arctic home can survive and thrive into the future.”

“Trump seems dead set on handing Big Oil as much of the Arctic as possible, despite the many significant risks to the people, species, and surrounding ecosystem,” said Hallie Templeton, Legal Director at Friends of the Earth. “We have kept a close watch on these handouts for years and have filed claim after claim in court whenever the federal government ignores mandatory duties to fully assess these harms. Today is no different. We will see the Trump administration in court for its blatant disregard of federal law and complete failure to protect this vulnerable and rapidly shrinking area of our planet.”

“This senseless push to auction off millions of acres of public land in the Arctic, including some of the region’s most sensitive and ecologically significant lands that have been protected for decades, will cause lasting harm to these irreplaceable lands, to the wildlife and people who depend on them, and to the climate,” said Earthjustice Attorney Jeremy Lieb. “The Trump administration is illegally allowing this massive lease sale to move forward without adequately studying the harms it would cause to the Western Arctic’s ecosystems and the climate, and without considering less-damaging alternatives. We will continue to fight to protect the Western Arctic, and ensure the government complies with the law.”

Background

The Western Arctic is the largest single tract of public land in the United States and remains largely undeveloped. When Congress transferred management of the Western Arctic from the U.S. Navy to the Bureau of Land Management in 1976, it recognized the area’s rich ecological values and required BLM to protect those values. When Congress authorized leasing and oil development in 1980, it again directed the federal government to ensure the protection of the Western Arctic’s ecological and cultural resources.

The Trump administration updated the IAP for the Western Arctic on Dec. 22, 2025, reviving a 2020 plan that allowed oil and gas leasing on 18.5 million acres or 82 percent of the 23-million-acre Reserve. Congress also passed a Congressional Review Act resolution last year that was then signed by the President, disapproving the 2022 plan that had been put in place by the Biden administration and that had maintained long-held protections for some of the Reserve’s most sensitive habitats. The new plan tries to erase the Colville River Special Area and part of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area.

Last year, the Trump administration also repealed a 2024 rule that provided additional protections to ecologically and culturally significant Special Areas within the Western Arctic. Those protections were enacted following a lengthy public process that spanned nearly 10 months and resulted in a quarter million people calling for the Western Arctic to be protected from oil and gas development under the law.

Despite all the changes made by this administration to the rules protecting the Western Arctic, the bedrock protections remain, and in fulfilling this obligation to hold a lease sale, BLM must follow federal laws and policies that require the agency to fully evaluate and consider environmental impacts and to protect the Reserve’s wildlife and habitat that is critical for the traditional subsistence practices of local people.