OSLO: Climate change has emerged as one of the most urgent threats to polar bears as wildlife officials from the five Arctic countries meet in Norway this week to discuss how to protect the vulnerable species.
The three-day conference that opens Tuesday in the northern Norway city of Tromsoe is the first since 1981 to bring together Norway, Danish-held Greenland, the United States, Canada and Russia to review a 36-year-old accord on protecting the world's estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears.
Hunting was the major threat to the bears when the agreement was signed in 1973. Some indigenous communities still depend on the hunts for food and income, but experts say stricter hunting rules allowed some polar bear populations to recover.
However, new threats have emerged in recent decades, especially global warming, which experts say is shrinking the ice-cap that polar bears need to hunt their staple food, seals.
“No ice equals no seals, which equals no polar bears. It's as simple as that,'' Geoff York, a polar bear expert at the World Wide Fund for Nature, said by telephone from Tromsoe on Monday.
The Norwegian government's Directorate for Nature Management is helping organize the meeting. It said 60 percent of the bears could be gone by 2050 because global warming melted their habitat.
Norway, which shares a population of about 1,900-3,600 animals with neighboring Russia, said the Polar Bear Agreement is still a good basis for protecting the bears even though threats have changed.
At the March 17-18 meeting, the five countries will discuss identifying and protecting critical polar bear habitat areas, managing hunting and seeking ways to curb the impact of greenhouse gasses and manmade toxins.
Polar bears are environmental indicators and with global warming hitting the Arctic first.
“They are up there at the very top of the food chain,'' said York. “They are an indicator of what can happen to the rest of the world because it will happen up there first.''
