50 Years of Polar Bear Conservation

This November marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears. The research programs and management measures it set in motion have transformed our understanding of polar bears and our ability to put in place the necessary steps to aid in their conservation.

Today, we know that there are approximately 26,000 polar bears across the Arctic, divided into 19 populations. Studies with radio collars have taught us much about polar bears’ movements and migration, and a combination of field research and Indigenous knowledge has revealed secrets about polar bear behavior, biology, and ecology. Meanwhile, the race is on to ensure the species’ survival in a world turned inside out by climate change.

In the years leading up to the conservation agreement, however, far less was known about polar bears, and the biggest concern for their future was not global warming – which wasn’t yet an issue — but overhunting.

“In Alaska, the commercial trophy hunt expanded from 139 in 1961 to 399 in 1966,” explains Dr. Ian Stirling, adjunct professor in the University of Alberta Department of Biological Sciences, author of Polar Bears: The Natural History of a Threatened Species, and one of the pioneering researchers into polar bear biology, ecology, and behavior. "In Svalbard, they were taking an average of 300 to 325 bears a year. Most of them were being taken with set guns, in which the bear sticks his head in something to try and get some bait and effectively shoots itself. It's nonselective, it killed females, killed cubs, and everything else. And the number of kills in Canada was also increasing at a very rapid rate.”

But while the growing number of kills was a concern, what exactly to do about it was unclear. Polar bear research was in its infancy then, and estimates of the total population were no more than unreliable guesses, with suggestions varying wildly from 5,000 to 25,000. Also, there was no agreement on whether polar bears were divided into multiple populations or constituted one, pan-Arctic conglomeration.

First meeting of experts

The first step, then, was to assemble the researchers who had done the most to answer those questions. In 1965,  scientists from the five polar bear nations gathered in Fairbanks, Alaska for the First International Scientific Meeting on the Polar Bear. Out of that meeting was born the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) of scientists, which first met in 1968 and has remained the authoritative body on polar bear science and management to this day.

The PBSG agreed to meet every two years. They convened for the second time in 1970 at IUCN’s headquarters in Switzerland, at the height of the Cold War, where the Soviet Union put forward a proposal for a protocol for the protection of polar bears. The proposal was met with enthusiasm, and within three years, the International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears was ready to be signed by representatives of the Arctic nations of Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway and Denmark (on behalf of Greenland).

Historic agreement

The agreement — which was signed in Oslo on November 15, 1973, and entered into force after all Range States’ governments had ratified it on May 26, 1976 — is a mere three-and-a-half pages long, with some of the most important wording contained in the first two Articles. 

Article I states that, except under specific circumstances enumerated further down in the document (such as traditional use and scientific research), the hunting, killing, and capturing of polar bears shall be prohibited. 

Article II is broader in its scope and enjoins signatories to “take appropriate action to protect the ecosystems of which polar bears are a part, with special attention to habitat components such as denning and feeding sites and migration patterns.” Article II also urges signatories to “manage polar bear populations in accordance with sound conservation practices based on the best available scientific data.”

Stirling notes that the agreement was the very first agreement of any kind, on any subject, that all the circumpolar nations signed. That the signing took place despite cold war tensions makes it all the more remarkable.

“Because of this, when it first came into effect,” Stirling says, “ there was a great deal of political pressure on everybody to adhere to it, because it set a very important conservation precedent for activities that were taking place in the Arctic.”

A spirit of cooperation

"The strength of the agreement is that it brings together people who have management responsibilities for polar bears so they can share information and develop strategies to address these new threats,” says Rosa Meehan, former manager of the marine mammal program in Alaska for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “It's not an agreement that's going to address carbon emissions or anything like that. But it can be used to help focus on the changes that you see in polar bears due to climate change, and to then share information on how to address those changes to the extent you can.”

One other highly significant element of the agreement, adds Meehan, is that it “was one of the first that identified the importance of traditional knowledge. I think it was prescient of the agreement to specifically incorporate that in the agreement. And there's been Native involvement since day one. And I think that's really important.”

The use of indigenous knowledge and the management of indigenous harvests are specifically addressed through some of the bilateral and multilateral accords that have been established under the agreement’s aegis. As traditional hunting remains permitted under the agreement, in 1988, the Inuvialuit of Canada and Inupiat in Alaska agreed to cooperate in managing the harvest of the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation of polar bears that straddles both their territories. In 2009, the governments of Canada, the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and Greenland signed a memorandum of understanding to manage the polar bears in the shared Kane Basin and Baffin Bay subpopulations. In addition, Russia and the United States agreed to coordinate efforts to conserve their shared Chukchi Sea subpopulation; similar agreements exist between the U.S. and Canada and Russia and Norway.

In 2015, all the signatories agreed on a comprehensive circumpolar action plan, a 10-year undertaking that builds on each country’s national program. It identified seven key goals, including minimizing threats to polar bears and their habitat, and ensuring the preservation and protection of that habitat.

The biggest threat to polar bears remains one that emanates from far beyond the Arctic, and beyond the capacity of a polar bear agreement to fix. But our understanding of how that threat impacts polar bears and the wider Arctic, and the steps we can take to mitigate it in the meantime, has improved immensely since the agreement came into force.

“What we're facing with polar bears is simply that the world is a very complicated place,” says Stirling. Despite the global challenges of an issue like climate change, the existence of the agreement has provided encouragement and support for carrying out a huge number of studies on polar bear population dynamics, reproductive rates, and effects of environmental change — studies fundamental to our understanding of their natural history and conservation The development of good techniques for handling bears with minimum disturbance, and the advent of satellite radio collars, has provided an amazing amount of information on defining population boundaries, along with insights on their numbers and their habitat use. A great deal of that would not have happened, says Stirling, without the agreement being in place.

“Without a doubt, we're in a much better position because of the agreement’s existence,” he says.

Kieran Mulvaney is a freelance writer who has written extensively about polar bears and the Arctic for publications including National Geographic, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. A native of Bristol, England, he lives in Bristol, Vermont.