Arctic communities: we’ll work together on polar bear encounters

A polar bear rummages around the dump outside of Arviat in 2013. Since the community worked with WWF to implement a polar bear monitor five years ago, the number of polar bear defence kills dropped from an average of eight per year before 2010 to an average of just one per year. (FILE PHOTO)

When it comes to polar bear encounters, Arctic communities agree on thing: the need for more measures to keep both people and polar bears safe.

And given the increase in encounters between polar bears and people in recent years, northern communities say they should be collaborating more on the issue.

Those are objectives that emerged from the three-day Front-Line Operators Workshop in Churchill, Man., last month, coordinated by World Wildlife Fund-Canada, which brought together Inuit leaders, government officials from Nunavut and Manitoba, tourism operators and researchers.

“We hope this kind of consensus will attract governments to do things differently, and better,” said Pete Ewins, who works in species conservation at WWF-Canada.

“Our hope is that we can raise further money to fund good initiatives that we all agree on.”

WWF-Canada has been involved with the issue in Nunavut for some time now. The the organization funds a polar bear patrol in Arviat, where a local monitor is paid to patrol the community’s streets at night during the fall and early winter, when bears are on their migration north.

The monitor uses spotlights, polar bear bangers or the revving noise from an own all-terrain vehicle to discourage polar bears that wander into the community.

The results have been positive. During the five-year program, the number of polar bear defence kills dropped from an average of eight per year before 2010 to an average of just one per year, the WWF said.

It’s a program that could expand — and with Government of Nunavut support —  be implemented in other communities.

Those at last month’s Churchill workshop also looked at other changes communities could make to prevent the polar bears from showing up in the first place.

“You don’t want to just focus on the band-aid solutions,” Ewins noted.

“One is the reactive, what you do when a polar bear is right there,“ he said. “And then there’s the proactive — what do you do to stop them from coming close in the first place?”

That means investing in things that will reduce what attracts the polar bears, generally county food storage facilities and municipal dumps to deter what Ewins called “the most advanced nose in the animal kingdom.”

In Churchill, for example, the municipality has launched a segregation waste diversion program in recent years. Churchill, with a population of 830, has former military buildings that can be can used to stack, store and bale local waste.

The municipality compacts plastics, glass and metals into cubes which are sent south by train to Thompson for recycling. The leftover waste is buried in the ground at a fenced-in dump, and then bulldozed over, leaving little scent.

That’s a harder program to implement in a territory like Nunavut, Ewins acknowledged.

“In Arviat’s case, a third of the waste in the local dump is used diapers, and that’s not unusual for most Nunavut communities,” he said. “And there aren’t a lot of options of what you can do with that kind of waste.”

In Arviat, wildlife officers have also used luring stations outside of town; baited traps to catch polar bears and then transport them farther north.

From September 2015 to December 2015, the community had 190 encounters with polar bears. Two polar bears were killed after they were determined to be a threat to human life.

Not only Kivalliq communities are at risk. People in Rankin Inlet, further up the west coast of Hudson Bay, hardly see any polar bears in town because that community lies inland of the animals’ migration route.

In Nunavut, Igloolik, Qikiqtarjuaq and Naujaat have reported the highest numbers of polar bears killed in defence of life or property since 2000.

Communities in Nunavik have also reported an increase in polar bear-human encounters, but to a lesser degree.

Paulusie Novalinga, from the Nunavik community of Puvirnituq on the eastern cost of Hudson Bay, also attended the March workshop as president of the region’s hunters, fishers and trappers organization.

“It is terrific that we made a big commitment to better educate our children, our community people and tourists about polar bears and how to manage the conflicts with people and their property,” Novalinga said.