Polar bear communities unite across continents
Lessons from Norway and Canada on living with polar bears
For most of us, the opportunity to spend time with wild polar bears would be the opportunity of a lifetime and a dream come true. For residents of Churchill, of Svalbard, or many other communities across the polar bear’s range, it can be a regular and repeated occurrence. While for many it can be a source of pride — as well as a source of welcome tourist dollars — it can also pose genuine challenges and even dangers.
For that reason, Polar Bears International (PBI) works with communities to reduce the risk of unwelcome encounters between polar bears and humans that can end up poorly for both sides.
“Part of being a polar bear conservation organization is making sure people who live and work in polar bear country are safe, and also that the polar bears are kept safe”, says Geoff York, PBI’s senior director of policy and research.
That task is all the more important and timely given that polar bears, particularly in the southern parts of their Arctic home, are spending more time on land. The sea ice that provides them with a platform to hunt the seals which are an important part of their diet is diminishing in extent and duration with climate change.
At the same time, the presence of food waste and other attractants lures hungry bears toward communities.
Famously, in January 2019, Belyusha Guba, the largest settlement on the Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, experienced a “mass invasion” of bears that had come ashore because of a lack of ice and lingered to take advantage of whatever garbage they could access.
In 2024, fire tore through the waste holding facility in Churchill that had replaced the town’s open dump and had helped reduce significantly the number of bear encounters in the town. Subsequently, an ice storm knocked out the electric fence guarding the town landfill, and as a result, some bears lingered in the community looking for food. There were no reports of bear-human encounters as a result, but the more that polar bears and people are in close and frequent contact, the more likely such events are to occur.
Different communities have taken different approaches to reducing the risk from living cheek-to-jowl with polar bears.
In Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, a group of volunteers known as the Watchmen keeps an eye out for bears approaching the community. In Churchill, wildlife officers and a seasonal trained team funded by the province of Manitoba respond to reports of bears, the Polar Bear Alert Program provides an emergency number for residents and tourists to call should a bear be spotted in town limits, and a Bear Smart Working Group helps the community take preventive measures such as siting bear-proof trash cans around town and improving safety education.
In 2024, PBI established a Polar Bear Safe Community Exchange program so that members of communities that live with polar bears can share experiences, problems, and solutions. That year, people from Svalbard and Ontario visited Churchill; in 2025, Svalbard played host to visiting Manitobans and a representative of northern Ontario communities.
Although the participants live on different continents, they have much in common. Not only do they have the shared experience of living alongside polar bears, but they all face the challenges inherent to remote communities with unique infrastructure needs.
The meetings help ideas flow and inspiration to be ignited. After witnessing Svalbard’s safe and efficient garbage handling and sorting system, the Canadians went home with fresh energy and ideas for how to improve their own waste management, particularly in light of the fire at their facility. Not only is garbage a big draw for bears, but once a bear finds an easy food reward, it becomes much more difficult to manage.
Conversely, the people in Svalbard by and large are less knowledgeable than those from Churchill about the behaviour of bears. Fewer bears come into communities and the human residents tend to be temporary, spending an average of seven years there, whereas members of the Canadian contingent have grown up with the bears and benefited from knowledge handed down through generations. They have a better sense for when a bear is approaching with curiosity, or when it is showing more aggression. This helps them better prepare for any encounters. This emphasis on learning bear behavior may affect formal training for professionals in Svalbard.
But the true value of the exchange is what happens after the participants have returned home. “What we’re really after is helping people create long-term relationships”, says York. “A week from now, a month from now, five years from now, they can reach out to their counterpart in another northern community when a problem arises.
While the capacity, the regulations, culture and language may be different, the passion for peaceful coexistence with the bears unites and inspires the two communities.
“People who live, work and recreate in polar bear country don’t want to have negative impacts on polar bear conservation”, says York. “They want to do the right thing. And so just seeing them work together and puzzle through some of these things and trying to come up with a better way, a better tool, a better regulation — that definitely gives me hope.”
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