1 Million Acres To Be Protected In National Petroleum Reserve For Teshekpuk Caribou Herd

Alaska’s News Source has some details below about a deal struck to preserve the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd among around 1 million acres o land in northern Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve:

Last week, the Bureau of Land Management issued a right of way to the Nuiqsut Trilateral, Inc. (NTI), providing durable, long-term protections for the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd. The protected land will include Teshekpuk Lake, a buffer around the lake and the migration patterns to the east and northwest. …

According to the BLM, the new Teshekpuk Lake Conservation Right of Way follows a community proposal received during the environmental analysis for the Willow Project. The proposal was a first-of-its-kind right-of-way agreement between BLM and NTI., a nonprofit corporation consisting of the Native Village of Nuiqsut, Kuukpik Corporation, and the City of Nuiqsut.

“Successfully implementing this mitigation measure will virtually eliminate the risk of further development in the most important caribou habitat areas—areas that will become even more important after Willow is constructed,” the Kuupik Corporation noted in a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in 2024.