How Many Polar Bears Are Left? Population and Climate Change

The global polar bear population

The figure of 22,000–31,000 comes from the 2015 IUCN Red List assessment of the polar bear, based on surveys collected by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group. Counting polar bears is hard: they roam over millions of square kilometers of drifting sea ice, often in darkness, and many areas are rarely visited by scientists.

For this reason the global number is an estimate with wide uncertainty, not a census. Some subpopulations have been counted carefully many times, while others, especially in the Russian Arctic and the central Arctic Basin, have never had a full survey. The overall global trend is officially listed as unknown.

Where do polar bears live?

Polar bears are found only in the Arctic, in Canada, the United States (Alaska), Greenland (part of the Kingdom of Denmark), Norway (the Svalbard archipelago) and Russia. Canada holds roughly two-thirds of all polar bears, from James Bay and Hudson Bay in the south to the high Arctic islands.

Scientists divide polar bears into 19 subpopulations, groups that mostly stay within one sea or region. Examples include Western Hudson Bay, Southern Hudson Bay, the Southern Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, Baffin Bay, the Barents Sea and East Greenland. In 2022, researchers also described a small, genetically distinct group of a few hundred bears in Southeast Greenland that hunt from pieces of glacier ice in fjords rather than from sea ice for much of the year.

Which polar bear subpopulations are declining?

In its 2021 status review, the Polar Bear Specialist Group compared each subpopulation with its earlier size:

The best-studied decline is in Western Hudson Bay, near the town of Churchill, Manitoba. Aerial surveys suggest the population fell from about 1,200 bears in the late 1980s to roughly 600 by 2021. In the Southern Beaufort Sea off Alaska and Canada, numbers dropped by about 40% during the 2000s, to roughly 900 bears around 2010. In both places, scientists have linked the declines to a longer ice-free season. Increases in M’Clintock Channel and Kane Basin are thought to reflect recovery after hunting was reduced, or changing ice conditions.

Why sea ice loss is the main threat

Polar bears hunt seals from sea ice, so the ice is their hunting platform. In the Arctic, sea ice in late summer now covers far less area than it did in the late 1970s, when satellite records began, and the ice-free season has grown longer in many regions. When the ice melts early and freezes late, bears are forced ashore, where there is little to eat, and must live on their fat reserves for longer. Learn more about their diet in what do polar bears eat?

Longer fasts mean thinner adults, fewer cubs and lower cub survival. Bears also have to swim farther between ice and land, which costs energy and is especially risky for young cubs. A 2020 study projected that, if greenhouse gas emissions stay high, most subpopulations could collapse by 2100, while lower emissions would allow more of them to survive. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago and northern Greenland, where thick ice is expected to last longest, are seen as likely last strongholds.

Other threats

Climate change is not the only pressure on polar bears:

• Pollution. Long-lasting chemicals such as PCBs and some pesticides travel to the Arctic on air and ocean currents. They build up in fat as they move up the food chain, and polar bears, at the top, carry some of the highest levels recorded in Arctic wildlife.
• Oil and gas. Offshore drilling and shipping bring the risk of oil spills, which would be very hard to clean up in ice-covered waters, and disturbance near dens.
• Conflict with people. As bears spend more time on land, more of them come into Arctic towns looking for food, and some must be moved or killed to protect people.
• Harvest. Regulated subsistence hunting by Indigenous peoples continues in Canada, Greenland and Alaska under quotas that are adjusted to population surveys.

How polar bears are protected

Uncontrolled hunting reduced polar bears in many areas in the mid-20th century. In 1973, Canada, Denmark (for Greenland), Norway, the Soviet Union and the United States signed the Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, which ended most commercial hunting and committed the five countries to protecting the bears’ habitat. Many subpopulations recovered afterward.

Today, the polar bear is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act since 2008, and as a species of special concern in Canada. International trade in polar bear products is controlled under CITES. Because the main threat is global warming, scientists agree that the long-term future of polar bears depends most of all on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For a broader view of Arctic wildlife facing the same changes, see Arctic animals.