Would international protections eliminate all hunting of polar bears?
No, they wouldn’t. Nor would we want it to. Subsistence hunting would still go on in both Canada and Alaska. NRDC supports subsistence hunting so long as it’s sustainable. The problem is that the hunting rate in Canada is unsustainable, and we believe that it’s largely driven by the commercial market. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you look at global warming models, the only place where polar bears are likely to exist at the end of the century is in the central archipelago of Canadian islands in the Arctic Sea. It’s going to be the last refuge of polar bears. More from NRDC Save BioGems: Polar Bears Fact Sheet: Polar Bears on Thin Ice Switchboard: Andrew Wetzler’s blog Could polar bears adapt to an environment without ice? Very few scientists believe that polar bears can survive without sea ice coverage; you don’t find polar bear populations anywhere there isn’t significant yearlong sea ice coverage. They need it for almost all of their essential life functions: to migrate,
