Human-polar bear conflict

Here you see a lot of sea ice drifting and this is where all life revolves around in the Arctic. The sea ice is getting thinner and it's breaking up much quicker in the season. The polar bears have to go onto this ice to hunt for seals in the spring. With less and less sea ice and the earlier breakup of sea ice in the season, polar bears are getting more and more difficulties to find prey on the ice. The future of the polar bear is not looking very very bright. What we see with the changing climate is that polar bears stay on land more and more. Certainly they're being seen more often in communities. They get attracted by human settlements, garbage, drying meat or other food laying around. The bears are really hungry sometimes when they are not able to forage on the sea ice and in other occasions they can be just curious because that's their nature. They can come really close to people and destroy their cabins or kill dogs even and sometimes this can also be a threat to people and in turn to polar bears when people need to defend themselves. It's really important that the industry, tour operators, tourists and local communities have guidelines and information on how to handle these kind of problems or how they can even avoid these problems. WWF supports local communities and scientists to make sure that they can have the measures to protect themselves while they are working or living in the Arctic. These measures include storage of food in bear safe containers, the use of electric fences and in some areas patrols are organized to protect villages from polar bears. Inside the village all buildings have open doors so if something happens all the people can go in and are safe and we have a whole system of who to be warned. So we're not walking around with guns or something like that but actually for the people in my station I give them these kind of signal pens which take a lot of time to be loaded but at least when you meet a polar bear you can try to chase it away and we always have them in our pocket. But then of course we have a flare gun which is just a big bang. So most people working or living in the Arctic they have dogs, sled dogs to move around and they keep them near the place they live and you can see here that they use the lines to put the dogs on when they're resting and they do it along the shoreline because this is the place where polar bears would patrol and search for food and the dogs can serve as a warning system. It's important to have knowledge about these conflicts or human polar bear interactions. One of the things we use for that is a new database. All the polar bear range states collect data on human polar bear interactions. It's meant to have more information and more insight in how these conflicts evolve and are created and what you can do to prevent them. It will also look at where the conflict hotspots are so that we can better allocate our funding and technical expertise to these areas. You've seen how well adapted polar bears are to the Arctic environment but there's also people living in the Arctic and the changes happening in the Arctic. Together they need to find a way to cope with these changes and to live in harmony.