Polar bears at risk as warming thaws icy home
*
POSTED: 1446 GMT (2246 HKT), May 21, 2007

Story Highlights
• Many experts say the long-term outlook for the polar bear is bleak
• An estimated 20,000-25,000 bears live around the Arctic
• Studies project that warming could melt the polar ice cap in summer
• Report: Polar bears won't survive as a species if there is no summer
sea-ice cover

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (Reuters) -- Time may be running out for polar
bears as global warming melts the ice beneath their paws.

Restrictions or bans on hunting in recent decades have helped protect
many populations of the iconic Arctic carnivore, but many experts say
the long-term outlook is bleak.

An estimated 20,000-25,000 bears live around the Arctic -- in Canada,
Russia, Alaska, Greenland and Norway -- and countries are struggling to
work out ways to protect them amid forecasts of an accelerating thaw.

"There will be big reductions in numbers if the ice melts," Jon Aars, a
polar bear expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said by the fjord in
Longyearbyen on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about 600 miles from
the North Pole.

Unusually for this time of year, the fjord is ice free.

Many restaurants and shops in Longyearbyen, a settlement of 1,800
people, have a stuffed polar bear or pelt -- often shot before a hunting
ban from the early 1970s. Self-defense is now the only excuse for
killing a bear.

Many scientific studies project that warming, widely blamed on emissions
of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, could melt the polar ice
cap in summer, with estimates of the break-up ranging from decades to
sometime beyond 2100.

Bears' favorite hunting ground is the edge of the ice where they use
white fur as camouflage to catch seals.

"If there's no ice, there's no way they can catch the seal," said Sarah
James of the Gwich'in Council International who lives in Alaska.
"Gwich'in" means "people of the caribou", which is the main source of
food for about 7,000 indigenous people in Alaska and Canada.

Threatened

U.S. President George W. Bush's administration is due to decide in
January 2008 whether to list polar bears as "threatened" under the
Endangered Species Act.

That would bar the government from taking any action jeopardizing the
animals' existence and environmentalists say it would spur debate about
tougher U.S. measures to curb industrial emissions.

The World Conservation Union last year listed the polar bear as
"vulnerable" and said the population might fall by 30 percent over the
next 45 years. Bears also suffer from chemical contaminants that lodge
in their fat.

Some indigenous peoples, who rely on hunts, say many bear populations
seem robust.

"The Russians thought there's more polar bears that they're seeing in
their communities, so they felt that it's not an endangered species,"
said Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Youth
Council, of an area of Arctic Russia.

"But if we're talking about the future and there's no ice, then they
are," she said.

And some reports say the melt may be quickening.

"Arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected
by most computer models," the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center
said in a report on April 30.

It said it could thaw earlier than projected by the U.N. climate panel,
whose scenarios say the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summers any
time between about 2050 to well beyond 2100.

An eight-nation report by 250 experts in 2004 said "polar bears are
unlikely to survive as a species if there is an almost complete loss of
summer sea-ice cover."

Paal Prestrud, head of the Center for International Climate and
Environmental Research in Oslo who was a vice-chair of that study, said
there was no Arctic-wide sign of a fall in numbers.

But there were declines in population and reduced weights among females
in the Western Hudson Bay area in Canada, at the southern end of the
bears' range where summer ice has been breaking up earlier.

Mitchell Taylor, manager of wildlife research at the Inuit-sponsored
environmental research department in Nunavut, Canada, said some bears in
region had simply moved north.
Hunters

"Hunters in many regions say they are seeing increases," he said. "It's
clear that the ice is changing but it's not at all clear that the trend
will continue."

Prestrud said the fate of polar bears may hinge on whether they adapt to
survive longer on land in summers. In the Hudson Bay, bears often go for
months without food, scavenging on birds' eggs or even on berries and roots.

"Otherwise they will end up in zoos," he said.

Aars, however, said the bears had survived temperature swings in the
past: "I hear far too often that within 100 years polar bears could be
extinct," he told a group of climate students in Longyearbyen.

"You will still have bays with ice for many months a year where polar
bears can live," he said.

On Svalbard, bears may have become less scared of people since the
hunting ban, and are more likely to see them as a meal. Aars'
recommendation: don't show you are scared.

"You start shouting, or use flare shots to make a noise. Most polar
bears get scared if you behave in the right way. But you have to act
from the start. If you show weakness you are in trouble."