New Federal Plan Balances Conservation, Other Uses Across Vast Public Lands in Alaska

After nearly a decade of public outreach, scientific study, and negotiations, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) enhanced protections for more than 13 million acres in central Alaska. The agency’s November 12, 2024 Record of Decision for its revised Central Yukon Resource Management Plan (RMP) balances conservation and other uses on lands and waters that 20 sovereign Tribes have used for hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultural practices for centuries.

The BLM decision also reflects the agency’s effort to address the unique challenges a quickly changing climate poses for this vast landscape.

The new plan is notable for several reasons. It designates “areas of critical environmental concern”—an agency classification for places with important natural or cultural value. The plan also protects salmon-producing watersheds and retains protections on lands covered under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which safeguards certain areas from mining claims and oil and gas development. The RMP also creates a system—known as BEACONS Adaptive Management, for Boreal Ecosystems Analysis for Conservation Networks—through which BLM will work with Tribes to conserve 4.6 million acres through careful planning and management, with the goal of maintaining their ecological characteristics as benchmarks in the ongoing study of climate change.

And the plan retains federal management of the Dalton Highway corridor, which runs from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay and includes about 2.2 million acres that are vital to Tribes’ subsistence cultures. The Alaska state government had sought to take over the corridor for development purposes. The BLM will manage the corridor, in part, as a backcountry conservation area, an agency classification that focuses on retaining an area’s natural assets. In another change, the RMP allows eligible Alaska Native Vietnam veterans or their heirs to select their rightful allotment claims—up to 160 acres of federal land per veteran—across 11.1 million acres previously unavailable for such selections.

The RMP also responds to the needs of the region’s Indigenous communities and wildlife with several innovative approaches to public lands management. These include management protections for 3.6 million acres of salmon-producing watersheds and restrictions on mining, oil, and gas development and other human-induced impacts in other important cultural areas.

Salmon populations have plummeted throughout the region over the past four years, threatening the dominant traditional food source for Tribes. In response, Tribes have been working to stop bycatch of salmon by the commercial pollock fishing fleet and have successfully gained a Tribal seat on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which sets catch limits and other policies for the region’s commercial fisheries.

To further help reverse the salmon decline, the BLM’s RMP adds management protections for a segment of the Jim River—about 220 miles north of Fairbanks, between the Brooks Range and the Yukon River—as an area of critical environmental concern, with a focus on conserving important salmon spawning grounds.

David W. Shaw

The Central Yukon RMP encourages collaborative efforts among land managers to foster landscape connectivity, which can offset the effects that habitat loss and fragmentation can have on biodiversity, help animals follow ancestral routes across the landscape, and increase the resilience of Alaska’s wildlife and ecosystems in the face of dramatic climate change. To that end, the RMP designates 371,000 acres as connectivity corridors based on input by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Alaska Center for Conservation Science, and Conservation Science Partners.

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Pew and its long-standing Indigenous partners, including the Bering Sea Interior Tribal Commission, applaud the BLM for listening to Tribal communities so innately connected to this important landscape. This final plan works for people and the biological diversity that supports community well-being throughout the region.

Suzanne Little is an officer and Matt Skroch is a project director with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.