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Polar Bears and Climate Change

by Zegrahm Expeditions, October 2006

Polar bears and climate change are making headlines these days, with a retreating ice pack and thinner polar bears causing concern. For several years now Zegrahm has been a supporter of Polar Bears International, the world's leading polar bear conservation organization. We're pleased to share a recent article about their new film series, In Their Own Words, featuring key polar bear scientists discussing bears and the Arctic ecosystem. Following is an excerpt from conversations with Dr. Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service and Dr. Andrew Derocher of the University of Edmonton.

Dr. Ian Stirling has been studying the Hudson Bay population of polar bears for more than 30 years and sees this population as part of a larger picture of Arctic climate change.

The bears are forced ashore each summer when the ice on the bay disappears. He notes that the average date of the ice break-up is now occurring nearly three weeks earlier, leaving the bears with a shorter hunting season. The newly landlocked bears spend the next four months living off their fat reserves. "The amount of fat that they're able to put on is critical," Stirling says. "If the ice breaks up earlier, they have a progressively shorter period of time in which to lay on those stores."

He notes that cubs, sub-adults, and elderly bears are particularly vulnerable to a shorter hunting season. "One of the things that we're finding is that the health of the bears has steadily declined over the last 30 years." The Western Hudson Bay polar bear population has dropped by 22% since 1987 and Stirling predicts that unless the climate stabilizes or starts cooling again, there won't be many polar bears left in the area in 30 or 40 years.

In the Beaufort Sea, where four drowned bears were recently found off the coast of Alaska, the effects of warmer temperatures are also being felt. The minimum ice-to- land distance used to be about 60 miles. "Now it's 200 to 300 kilometers," he says. "Swimming 100 miles is not a big deal for a polar bear, especially a fat one. They just kind of float along. But as the ice gets farther out from shore, it's a longer swim that costs more energy."

Dr. Stirling also noted that more polar bears have recently found their way to human settlements. "A starving carnivore doesn't just lie down and die," he says. "It's going to look for an alternate food source. In Western Hudson Bay that means either garbage dumps, hunting camps, or, occasionally, people. [Residents are] seeing many more bears in West Coast settlements and that's been interpreted as an increase in the population. In fact, it's the exact opposite."

Dr. Andrew Derocher echoed Stirling's concerns about diminishing sea ice. "The ice is of key importance to the bears. When you take away the habitat of an organism, you lose the organism. If we lose the sea ice, it's pretty clear that we're going to lose the bears."

Derocher says that many people ask, "If the ice melts, won't polar bears become more like brown bears?" He replies that it took polar bears roughly 400,000 years to evolve from brown bears. "What we're asking an animal to do in the space of less than 100 years is to turn back the clock and lose those adaptations and go back to being a largely plant-eating animal."

Derocher says that it's clear that climate change is happening in the Arctic, beyond Hudson Bay. "We know from projections from ice scientists and places like NASA that the ice has changed substantially and that it will continue to change, maybe at an accelerated rate."

Derocher believes that education is a major component of conservation. "If people truly understand the dangers not only to polar bears but to other animal species, I think they would change their behavior, starting with small, incremental changes. Longer term, we really need to see new technologies that will lessen the impact that we have on a global scale."

He also advocates for governments and industry to play a role in developing reasonable alternatives to fossil fuels, although the call for policy change will probably have to come from the bottom up rather than the top down, with citizens contacting their governments to request change.

"At the end of the day, I'm an optimist," he says. "I'm a great believer in the advances of technology. We just have to find them." And as for beginning the process of saving the polar bears, humans need to leave a lighter footprint on the planet.

For more on this film series or polar bears in general, visit www.polarbearsinternational.org. Zegrahm believes that for substantive change to occur, awareness is the first step. We will return to the realm of the polar bear in August 2007, with our voyage to Spitsbergen & the White Sea.