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Habitat Saved

MAMMAL SPECIES living on islands tend to become diminutive compared to their continental relatives, and the deer of the Florida Keys are no exception. Looking like an otherwise perfect specimen of the Virginia white-tailed deer, of which it is an endangered subspecies, the Key deer stands scarcely 2 feet tall at the shoulder and rarely weighs more than 75 pounds. Nevertheless, poachers reduced its numbers to perhaps 50 animals by the 1940s. Protecting Key deer became one of NWF’s first major commitments after the organization was founded in 1936.

Today the poaching has largely stopped, but survival of the 600 deer that live only on Big Pine and a few nearby islands nevertheless remains in jeopardy. The main threat is development, which takes up deer habitat and brings more people to the Keys, where collisions with motor vehicles are among the primary sources of deer mortality. Ironically, the federal government—charged with protecting Key deer under the Endangered Species Act—has been underwriting the habitat destruction that threatens the deer as well as seven other listed species.

How so? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been issuing flood insurance to property owners building on floodplains in the Keys—insurance that private companies will not provide and that makes development possible in deer habitat. To stop this harmful process NWF, the Florida Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife sued FEMA in 1990 for failing to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on this action, as required by the federal Endangered Species Act for federal actions that may harm listed species. That suit led to a 1994 ruling that required consultation.

The consultation report, called a biological opinion, was released in 1997. “It was very weak,” says Randy Sargent Neppl, NWF wildlife conservation counsel. “It didn’t require more than voluntary measures.” However, the biological opinion stated that if FEMA did not produce a habitat conservation plan within five years, the opinion would have to be reassessed. No plan appeared, and FWS released a new opinion in 2003; ironically it was nearly identical to the first one, driving NWF back to court. “We said that FWS did not follow up to see if its recommendations were being followed, and we asked for and won a court injunction on new development in the Keys,” Neppl says. The injunction will remain until FWS produces a new biological opinion.

The ruling affects a few hundred acres of private land, but the legal implications extend to all states where builders rely on federal flood insurance. The injunction requires that before floodplains are developed, FEMA must consult with FWS to ensure no harm to listed species. “None of the groups involved in the case want to stop all development,” says John Kostyack, an NWF executive director who has represented NWF on the lawsuit for the past 15 years and has argued the case in court, “but we do want to end a federal subsidy that encourages development in areas critical to the survival of threatened and endangered species.”

The outcome of the Keys FEMA court case benefits not only threatened and endangered species but also the taxpayers who would have footed the bill for drowned structures. Floods and severe storms, according to a recent NWF report on global warming and rainfall, are among the most costly of weather and climate disasters, tallying more than $115 billion in damages from 1960 to 2005. Floods accounted for 164 million of some 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007. The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, Belgium, estimates that in recent decades, the number of flood and storm disasters worldwide has risen 7.4 percent yearly. Disasters increase not only because storms may be becoming more intense in the wake of global warming, but also because increasing numbers of people are moving into flood-prone areas or alternating the way natural flood systems work. However, lawsuits brought by NWF and other groups in Washington state’s Puget Sound and Mississippi’s Yazoo River Basin are helping to ensure that development in floodplains tightens up.