The US Interior Department will announce today if the polar bear is to be listed as threatened and in need of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Interior Department could no longer postpone the decision on whether to list the polar bear as an endangered species.

The Fish and Wildlife Service took all the time in the world to make a decision, repeatedly failing to meet deadlines, and apparently ignoring all requests to do something before it was too late. While the agency struggles with the papers, as Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services explained earlier this year, the polar bear does not have that much time.

“Defendants have been in violation of the law requiring them to publish the listing determination for nearly 120 days,” the court decision said. “Other than the general complexity of finalizing the rule, Defendants offer no specific facts that would justify the delay, much less further delay.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, together with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace decided to sue the Bush administration for all the delays on the polar bear decision on March 10, and filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

"We did fail to meet a deadline earlier this year," said Interior Department spokesman Shane Wolfe, quoted by the Associated Press. "Interior Department employees continue to work toward a final decision. We are reviewing the court's decision. We are evaluating the legal options and will determine the appropriate course of action."

The Fish and Wildlife Services were asked to review the polar bears’ situation three years ago, and ever since then it’s been nothing but delays and hard to believe explanations.

Last year the U.S. Geological Survey released a report saying that the world’s population of polar bears risked severe decimation within the following decades due to global warming.

As the bears’ indispensable ice sheets continue to melt, the carnivorous mammals will start to disappear. Polar bears depend on ice shelves, as they spend much of their lives there. They need sea ice as a platform for breeding and for hunting seals, their primary food.

The study estimated that, by 2050, about 42 percent of “optimal polar bear habitat” could be lost in summertime. While the bears will not become extinct, they could disappear completely from Alaska, the study forecasted.