Last Tuesday we wrote about how the whitebark pine -- a tree that ranges across the American West and provides grizzly bears with a crucial food source -- is now officially, according to the U.S. government, endangered by climate change. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's landmark decision, however, didn't put Pinus albicaulis on the official endangered species list or require the government to do anything to protect it from extinction. Technically, FWS declared that listing the whitebark pine under the Endangered Species Act was "warranted but precluded."

Say what? Initial reports of the FWS decision didn't do much to explain this quirky phrase, basically offering that the government didn't have the resources to deal with putting the species on the list, though the science was clear that it belonged there.

For instance, here's how NRDC's press release put it:

The “warranted but precluded” decision acknowledges that climate change is driving the tree species to the brink, but the Service’s limited budget prevents adding whitebark to the federal endangered species list at this time.

But isn't the hard science already done? Being naive and desperately ignorant of the finer points of the ESA, I wondered: What's the holdup? So I dug in a bit to get to the bottom of what the heck "warranted but precluded" really means, and how things could play out for the whitebark pine.

Three Potential Outcomes of the Listing Process

The Endangered Species Act requires that listing decisions be made “solely on the basis of the best science and commercial data available.” If the science is available, the service has 12 months to come to one of three conclusions:

Warranted But Precluded

If it determines that a listing is “warranted but precluded,” the service must include “a description and evaluation of the reasons and data on which the finding is based” in its finding document. (Here’s the one for whitebark pine.) The agency must prove “expeditious progress” to list, delist, or reclassify each candidate species, and every year it must report on that progress.

FWS publishes a compilation of these reports called the Candidate Notice of Review (CNOR) every November. According to FWS, there are currently 265 candidate species on the CNOR.

Listing Priority Number

Species that sits in this endangered CNOR purgatory are assigned a "Listing Priority Number" that determines the order in which the service will address them. This number is based on three factors: magnitude, immediacy, and taxonomic status. According to a Congressional Research Service Report (PDF) about the ESA process, "Magnitude means whether the threats to the survival of the species are high. Immediacy is defined as when those threats will begin. Taxonomic status means the importance of that species biologically."

LPNs range from 1 to 12; the lower the number, the higher the priority for dealing with the species. As of last November, there were no species with an LPN of 1, but 95 species that are classified as a 2. The whitebark pine is a 2. FWS describes why:

We assigned Pinus albicaulis a Listing Priority Number (LPN) of 2 based on our finding that the species faces threats that are of high magnitude and are imminent. The main threats to P. albicaulis include disease and predation, and the present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat due to environmental changes and exacerbating effects of climate change and fire and fire suppression. A secondary threat is caused by the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms. This is the highest priority that can be provided to a species under our guidance.

Why the Hold Up?

Of course, none of this addresses why, exactly, FWS isn’t able to just list the species that are “warranted.” It comes down to the agency’s ability to form a plan and act on an official listing status. While it’s true that the hard science of determination is already done, once a species is actually listed, the service is legally compelled to generate a formal recovery plan and to publish it within a year.

Mark Sattelberg, field supervisor in FWS’s Wyoming Ecological Services Field Office, explained to me that there are “limited resources as far as personnel and money” for generating these plans. In other words: the budget isn’t there to protect the whitebark pine.

We know it’s going extinct, we know what the problem is, but we don’t have the political will to do anything about it.

So What Now?

The service will have to revisit the tree's status in a year "to determine if resources are available to begin generating a species recovery plan which would outline goals and tactics for protecting and recovering whitebark pine."

Sattelberg explained that there are still other species whose status “merits listing before the whitebark pine, and so we're working on those first.”

The question then becomes: Will they get to it in time? A recent study found that more than 80 percent of the whitebark pine forests of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana are already dead or dying, and in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the species is predicted to be “functionally extinct” within a mere 10 years.

In the meantime, the slightly good news is that both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have provisions that require protection of candidate species. This is significant in the whitebark pine case, because roughly 96 percent of the tree’s widespread habitat is in federally owned or managed land. Those agencies won’t be able to take any actions that directly threaten the trees. Unfortunately, the biggest threat to the tree isn’t logging or wildfire or any specific management practice. It's a tiny, aggressive beetle that’s flocking with warmer temperatures to the tree’s habitat and leaving vast swaths of dead trees in its wake. So these agency protections won’t save the whitebark pine.

The only real hope for the whitebark pine’s survival would be to reverse the trend of global warming by drastically reducing greenhouse gas pollution. That might be an impossible task for the Fish and Wildlife Service regardless of the tree's official status -- warranted or not.