Polar Bear Sustainability Alliance
Photo © R. & C. Buchanan. Click image to enlarge.
Polar Bears will need our help as their habitat changes. PBI team members are developing contingency plans to assist management authorities.
Pressures continue to build on polar bears as their icy habitat shrinks, leaving the bears with a shorter hunting season and disrupted movement patterns. In 2008, the Arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level since satellite measuring began in 1979, ending the year 34% below the long-term average for 1979-2000.
As the Arctic continues to warm, polar bears stranded onshore have started to show up in coastal communities, where their presence threatens both humans and bears. Others are swimming long distances in search of ice from which to hunt.
“It's clear that polar bears are in trouble,” says Amy Cutting of the Oregon Zoo, who serves on PBI's Advisory Council and chairs the Alliance. “As the pack ice retreats, we anticipate problems ranging from nutritionally stressed bears arriving in villages to an increased number of orphaned cubs.”
Gearing up for the Challenge
Given the urgency of the situation, PBI reached out to the zoo community for help with developing action plans to assist affected bears. “They're the experts on animal rescue,” says PBI's president, Robert Buchanan, “so we encouraged them to take a leadership role.”
In response, Cutting and others members of the zoo community held an initial meeting in 2008 to sketch out various response scenarios in order to provide decision-makers with a menu of potential actions. The group then met with field biologists and other members of PBI's Advisory Council in January 2009 to fine-tune those ideas and discuss additional strategies. Representatives from government agencies, industry, and other conservation groups joined the discussion as well.
“It was a productive meeting,” Cutting says. “We explored ways to collaborate and recalculated our priorities.”
For example, Cutting says that working with coastal settlements jumped near the top of the list as human-polar bear encounters are expected to be a growing problem. “In 2008, wayward bears showed up in the Yukon Territories, Nunavut, and Iceland,” she says. “We anticipate seeing more as the sea ice melts. Our goal is to provide information and resources that will help these communities live safely with their bears.”
Science-Based Solutions
The group also explored a menu of hypothetical options for other potential scenarios. These range from the rescue of orphaned cubs to helping malnourished bears through supplemental feeding protocols. Their plan is to create a resource guide for management authorities so they will have information at hand as the situation changes on the ground.
“The goal is to assemble the best technical information and other needed resources to assist management authorities,” says Cutting. “These will help managers develop policy and contingency plans to sustain polar bear populations in a rapidly changing Arctic. We want them to know that we are poised to provide resources and to help implement whatever conservation strategies they choose to pursue in the coming crisis.”
Saving Arctic Sea Ice
Finally, team members agreed that the top priority is to communicate the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reverse global climate change.
“We created an awareness team to help get out this message,”Cutting says. “The public can have a huge impact on policy makers. Pressure from the electorate can help facilitate change.”
She adds that while the Polar Bear Sustainability Alliance will help save individual bears, it is important that the initiative doesn’t become a distraction from the key message of stopping global climate change.
“We may be able to help individual bears in the short term, but people need to understand that the only way to save polar bears, as a species, is to reverse global warming and the melting of the sea ice,” Cutting says.
For more on the Sustainability Alliance, click here.
Pressures continue to build on polar bears as their icy habitat shrinks, leaving the bears with a shorter hunting season and disrupted movement patterns. In 2008, the Arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level since satellite measuring began in 1979, ending the year 34% below the long-term average for 1979-2000.
As the Arctic continues to warm, polar bears stranded onshore have started to show up in coastal communities, where their presence threatens both humans and bears. Others are swimming long distances in search of ice from which to hunt.
“It's clear that polar bears are in trouble,” says Amy Cutting of the Oregon Zoo, who serves on PBI's Advisory Council and chairs the Alliance. “As the pack ice retreats, we anticipate problems ranging from nutritionally stressed bears arriving in villages to an increased number of orphaned cubs.”
Gearing up for the Challenge
Given the urgency of the situation, PBI reached out to the zoo community for help with developing action plans to assist affected bears. “They're the experts on animal rescue,” says PBI's president, Robert Buchanan, “so we encouraged them to take a leadership role.”
In response, Cutting and others members of the zoo community held an initial meeting in 2008 to sketch out various response scenarios in order to provide decision-makers with a menu of potential actions. The group then met with field biologists and other members of PBI's Advisory Council in January 2009 to fine-tune those ideas and discuss additional strategies. Representatives from government agencies, industry, and other conservation groups joined the discussion as well.
“It was a productive meeting,” Cutting says. “We explored ways to collaborate and recalculated our priorities.”
For example, Cutting says that working with coastal settlements jumped near the top of the list as human-polar bear encounters are expected to be a growing problem. “In 2008, wayward bears showed up in the Yukon Territories, Nunavut, and Iceland,” she says. “We anticipate seeing more as the sea ice melts. Our goal is to provide information and resources that will help these communities live safely with their bears.”
Science-Based Solutions
The group also explored a menu of hypothetical options for other potential scenarios. These range from the rescue of orphaned cubs to helping malnourished bears through supplemental feeding protocols. Their plan is to create a resource guide for management authorities so they will have information at hand as the situation changes on the ground.
“The goal is to assemble the best technical information and other needed resources to assist management authorities,” says Cutting. “These will help managers develop policy and contingency plans to sustain polar bear populations in a rapidly changing Arctic. We want them to know that we are poised to provide resources and to help implement whatever conservation strategies they choose to pursue in the coming crisis.”
Saving Arctic Sea Ice
Finally, team members agreed that the top priority is to communicate the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reverse global climate change.
“We created an awareness team to help get out this message,”Cutting says. “The public can have a huge impact on policy makers. Pressure from the electorate can help facilitate change.”
She adds that while the Polar Bear Sustainability Alliance will help save individual bears, it is important that the initiative doesn’t become a distraction from the key message of stopping global climate change.
“We may be able to help individual bears in the short term, but people need to understand that the only way to save polar bears, as a species, is to reverse global warming and the melting of the sea ice,” Cutting says.
For more on the Sustainability Alliance, click here.