Nunavut, Greenland agree to jointly manage polar bears

Nunavut and Greenland announced last week that they’ll work towards a joint management plan for their shared population of polar bears.

“I am very happy that we have an agreement to co-manage this unique and valuable resource. Polar bears are important symbols for both of our people,” said Greenland’s fisheries and hunting minister, Rasmus Frederiksen.

The final management plan will be a country-to-country agreement, that is, between Canada and Greenland and Denmark.

About 70 percent of the 21,500 to 25,000 polar bears in the world live in Nunavut and Greenland.

In a news release, Olayuk Akesuk, Nunavut’s environment minister, said he is pleased that the “Inuit of Nunavut and Greenland are committed to responsible wildlife management and are working together to ensure the sustainability of our shared polar bear populations.”

The decision to work together was reached in January, when senior officials from Nunavut visited Greenland. Their trip came not long after Greenland’s announcement of plans to open its polar bear hunt to tourists.

Only residents of Greenland who are professional hunters have, until now, been permitted to kill polar bears.

“We expect that people who go after the really big trophies and who have earlier been on elephant hunts will come,” said Mads Skift, a consultant at Greenland’s national tourist board, earlier this year.

A solid management plan for polar bears will be the key to attracting U.S. sports hunters and gaining approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the importation of polar bear trophies to the U.S.

Officials from Greenland and Canada drafted an agreement to co-manage the three shared polar bear populations, located in the Kane Basin, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait.

“So we know how many animals we can take from these three populations, it’s really important that we be able to work together,” said Jane Cooper, deputy minister at the GN’s environment department.

“There is international pressure that we have to start looking at our bears and start being responsible, and I think Greenland recognizes that. And the more pressure there is on the resources, it becomes more and more obvious that we have to be responsible,” Cooper said.

The shared management agreement will outline how and when scientific research will be conducted and set quotas or total allowable harvests. The setting of quotas or total allowable harvests will be based on international agreements, scientific research and traditional knowledge, says the news release.

The announcement that Greenland is ready to adopt quotas and discuss co-management with Canada came as the World Wildlife Fund released a report, criticizing the home rule government for failing to control hunting of polar bears and walruses.

The WWF report said Greenland’s polar bears, walruses, belugas and narwhals will be endangered if the home rule does not tighten hunting and trapping regulations.

Greenland’s national radio channel KNR reported that among the organization’s concerns was that the home rule government had not set quotas for polar bears.

“Polar bears are already under pressure because of climate changes and pollution,” said the WWF’s Anne-Marie Bjorg. “If hunters take a big proportion at the same time, we risk that the same thing will happen as it did for the walruses [and there will be] a very small and vulnerable stock.”

According to the WWF report, about 350 walruses and 200 polar bears are caught every year in Greenland.

The WWF is also concerned that quotas set for beluga and narwhals are much higher than the recommendations made by biologists.

The WWF said concrete information about the stocks was sparse, but that the home rule government should give the animal stocks the benefit of the doubt.

Brigitte Bardot, the aging French film star, has also slammed Greenland for its plans to open a sports polar bear hunt, writing a scathing letter to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

“I have been fighting for years to stop the ice shelf being stained with the blood of thousands of seals shamelessly exterminated in Canada and Norway. Your country also seems to want to leave its stamp on the ice shelf by causing the blood of these innocent bears to flow, bears whose survival is already threatened by global warming,” Bardot wrote.