Some 30 polar bears live in German zoos and there are less than 100 zoos in the US, but most polar bears are in the wild.

“It is estimated that about 25,000 polar bears are still living in their natural habitat. We know that this is not much and by now the threats are also increasing. It is not only the ubiquitous climate change which of course could lead to the vanishing of the basis of life for polar bears, the ice.”

And our Arctic sea ice is declining by some reports about 10 percent a decade. Without that ice, bears can’t hunt the seals that make up most of their diet.

“They have to capture at least one seal every five to ten days. That’s just the break-even and if they don’t do that, they’re gonna lose weight, and if they lose weight, then there are other things that come into play with their health, their ability to reproduce and so forth.”

And that is increasingly leading some polar bears to look for food where people live. It got so bad in the Russian region of Novaya Zemlya in February that authorities declared a state of emergency to deal with the bears.

“The reason for the concentration in Novaya Zemlya is obviously their garbage place. It looks like they put huge portions of something edible. Some people talk about fish or something like that, and it attracts the polar bear.”

And while polar bear numbers are increasing in some places, in other places they’re down by about 40 percent. Climatologists predict the Arctic will have ice-free summers beginning in 2050. If that happens, environmentalists believe polar bears won’t be able to survive in the wild.

“It was normal event in some areas. There wasn’t any ice for a couple of weeks, a month maybe, but now it’s several months.”

The concern is that by the end of the century, the only way to see polar bears will be in a zoo.

Source: http://www.kekenet.com/broadcast/201903/579772.shtml