A Critical Role for Critical Habitat in the Recovery Planning Process? Not Yet

The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) generally requires that critical habitat be designated for all species listed as endangered or threatened. However, it has been designated for only ∼10% of listed species. Recently, in response to several recent court orders and settlement agreements that require critical habitat to be designated for ∼300 species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to divert all available budget resources for 2001 to address the backlog of designations. This decision underscores a central question in the controversies surrounding critical habitat designation: How does critical habitat benefit the conservation and eventual recovery of listed species? Here, we examined how designation of critical habitat influenced the recovery planning process by comparing the content and characteristics of recovery plans for species with and without designated critical habitat. Critical habitat designation did not increase the availability of information on species' habitat requirements or increase the likelihood that recovery plans prescribed habitat management or habitat acquisition among the necessary recovery tasks. Recovery plans for species with critical habitat were not more likely to include habitat considerations among criteria for measuring recovery. Recovery plans for species with critical habitat uniformly ranked habitat concerns among the top threats to species and, on average, proposed a greater diversity of habitat monitoring efforts. Overall, however, we concluded that critical habitat designations have had negligible positive influence in the recovery planning process. We discuss possible explanations and suggest a standards-based system for designating critical habitat that should promote more effective contributions to recovery efforts for threatened and endangered species.