The polar bear has a public relations problem in both directions. For two decades it has been the face of the melting Arctic, thin and stranded on a shrinking floe. For almost as long there has been a counter-claim: polar bear numbers have gone up, not down, four- or fivefold since the 1960s, while the ice retreated the whole time. If the ice is the bears’ habitat and the ice is going, how can there be more bears?
It is a good question, and it deserves numbers rather than a slogan. The numbers exist. The IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Polar Bear Specialist Group publishes them every few years. Since the 1960s the group has coordinated polar bear research across the five countries where the bears live1. Its latest published status table is dated October 2024, and in January 2026 it reported an update, made in October 2025, to those countries’ governments23. It is a spreadsheet, not a press release. Read together with the surveys behind it, it answers the question: partly in the claim’s favour, mostly not.
What the global number is made of
Start with the number everyone quotes. There is no global polar bear census, and there never has been. Instead there are twenty separately managed subpopulations, regional groups of bears that are surveyed by different teams in different decades with different methods2. The global figure comes from adding the surveys together and guessing at the gaps.
The anatomy of the world’s polar bear number
Adding up every current estimate gives about 24,600 bears. The surveys behind them span twenty-six years, and four subpopulations contribute nothing because they have no estimate at all.
Two of the sixteen estimates date from the 1990s: Lancaster Sound and Norwegian Bay were last counted in 19972. Two were new in the 2025 update. Viscount Melville Sound’s figure from 1992 gave way to one from a study that ended in 2014, and East Greenland got its first estimate ever, from an aerial survey flown in 2023: 2,364 bears in the group’s table, 2,275 in the version published in March 2026345. The Barents Sea figure is from 2004, the Northern Beaufort Sea’s from 20062. The Kara and Laptev seas in the Russian Arctic have no number at all. Their entries have been blank since 2005, when the group removed figures that did not rest on accepted scientific methods, to avoid “the incorrect impression that reliable data were available”6.
The familiar 26,000 is the group’s latest global estimate, published in 2016, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 22,000 to 31,0006. It is a modelled total with a spread of nine thousand bears, not a headcount, and the group warns that such totals reflect “the status of polar bears as well as the amount and quality of scientific information”6. Anyone who quotes it as a count, on either side of the argument, claims a precision that does not exist.
The 1960s figure was worse
Now for the baseline. The claim that numbers have quintupled rests on a starting figure of about five thousand bears, some time around the 1960s7. Where does that come from?
It is the bottom of the lowest of three estimates that were on the table at the first international scientific meeting on polar bears, held in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 19651. Canada’s delegation listed them side by side: 5,000 to 8,000 bears from the Soviet biologist Savva Uspensky; “well over 10,000” from the Canadian biologist C. R. Harington, who put 6,000 to 7,000 in the Canadian Arctic alone; and 17,000 to 19,000 from a 1959 study that extrapolated from an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 bears near the Alaskan coast8. The Soviet delegation explained where its own figure of “not more than 8,000” came from: about 500 maternity dens in the Soviet Arctic and the assumption that one bear in five is a pregnant female8. That makes roughly 2,500 bears for the Soviet Arctic (own calculation); the paper does not show the step to the whole world. Each of the three started from one national sector and was stretched to the whole Arctic.
Ian Stirling, who spent his career studying the animals, was blunt: any number given as an estimate of the total population at that time “would simply have been a guess and, in all likelihood, 5,000 was almost certainly much too low”7. Thor Larsen, a Norwegian scientist who was studying polar bears at the time, said most of the data from the late 1960s and early 1970s were “indeed anecdotal, simply because proper research was lacking”. As far as he could remember, researchers then worked with a worldwide figure of 20,000 to 25,000 bears. That is about what the specialist group says today, and it would mean no rise at all7.
The 1960s figure was an acknowledged guess; the modern figure is a modelled range.
— The arithmetic problem
The missing baseline is a problem for everyone, not a gotcha against the sceptics, and it cuts both ways: it undermines the claim that numbers have quintupled, and it also undermines any confident claim of long-run decline. What it rules out is the ratio. You cannot divide a modelled total by an anecdote and report the quotient as a fact.
What did change: the rifles
Something did change after the 1950s, and it had nothing to do with the climate.
Polar bear hunting had been on an industrial scale: bears were hunted from ships, killed with baited set guns and shot from aircraft9. In the Barents Sea, harvest records show about 300 bears taken a year for the century before 197010. The response was the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, concluded in Oslo by Canada, Denmark, Norway, the United States and the Soviet Union. It banned hunting from aircraft and large motorised vessels and otherwise allowed killing only for science, for conservation or by local people hunting in traditional ways11. Norway closed its hunt outright in 1973; the Soviet Union had already closed its own in 19572.
The effect shows where the record is long enough to see it. The specialist group judges that the Barents Sea subpopulation “very likely increased” between 1973 and 2015. Different lines of evidence, it says, “suggest the population grew steadily after 1973, and at least until recently”, meaning about 20152. (The whole area was last counted in 2004; a survey in 2015 covered the Norwegian part2.)
The sceptics’ case is at its strongest here, and it is true: polar bear numbers rose over the second half of the twentieth century in at least some of the Arctic, because people stopped shooting so many of them. It is a conservation success story, and a story about wildlife law rather than the climate, which is why it says nothing about what the climate will do to the bears next.
The trend table
So much for history. What is happening now?
Short-term trend, all twenty subpopulations
The specialist group assesses each subpopulation over roughly one polar bear generation (11.5 years). This is the whole world, as updated in October 2025.
Show the numbers
| Short-term trend | Count | Subpopulations |
|---|---|---|
| Data deficient | 9 | Arctic Basin, Baffin Bay, East Greenland, Kara Sea, Lancaster Sound, Laptev Sea, Northern Beaufort Sea, Norwegian Bay, Southeast Greenland |
| Likely stable | 6 | Barents Sea, Chukchi Sea, Foxe Basin, Gulf of Boothia, Southern Hudson Bay, Viscount Melville Sound |
| Likely / very likely decreased | 3 | Davis Strait, Southern Beaufort Sea, Western Hudson Bay |
| Likely increased | 2 | Kane Basin, M’Clintock Channel |
Nine of the twenty are marked data deficient, meaning the group declines to name a direction. Six are stable, three are declining and two are increasing3. Over the long term (two generations or more) the table is emptier still: fifteen of the twenty are data deficient. Two are assessed as having increased. One is the Barents Sea, over the period that begins with the hunting ban2. The update does not name the other; it is presumably Viscount Melville Sound, where the new study finds that numbers likely rose between 1989–1992 and 2012–2014 as the bears recovered from overhunting34. One is stable and two have decreased3.
No line in the table says the global population is growing, and none says it is shrinking. The fair reading is that nobody knows, because nine of the twenty subpopulations have no usable trend: four have no estimate at all, East Greenland has a first estimate and nothing to compare it with, and the other four were counted too long ago, or in ways too different to compare23.
That conclusion comforts neither side. The data do not show that polar bears are dying out: the species is listed as Vulnerable on the strength of a projection, not an observed global decline12. Nor do they show that polar bear numbers are growing.
The best-counted bears
Around Hudson Bay the same aerial surveys have been flown three times, five years apart, and analysed the same way each time13. The better known of the two subpopulations there is among the most closely studied on earth: Western Hudson Bay, the bears of Churchill.
Western Hudson Bay, among the most-studied polar bears in the world
The 2011, 2016 and 2021 aerial surveys were analysed with the same methods: down 11% and then down 27%, though neither step is statistically significant on its own. The 1987 figure comes from capture-recapture work and is shown for scale, not as a strict comparison.
Show the numbers
| Year | Estimate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1987 | 1,185 | capture-recapture; not directly comparable |
| 2011 | 949 | aerial survey |
| 2016 | 842 | −11% on 2011 |
| 2021 | 618 | −27% on 2016 |
The survey’s authors are careful about what the three numbers show. No step from one survey to the next is statistically significant, and the fall from 949 to 618 over the whole decade passes only a lenient test, at the 10 percent level13. The clearer signal is in which bears went missing. Between 2011 and 2021 the estimated number of adult females fell by about 40 percent and the number of subadults, the young bears not yet of breeding age, by about 65 percent, while the number of adult males did not change13. Biologists predicted this pattern some thirty years ago for a population losing its sea ice: the young bears and the mothers go first13.
Hunting probably contributed. The harvest rose from about 2.5 percent of the estimated population in 2011 to 6.6 percent in 2021, more than the population could replace13. But it fits the pattern badly. Hunters there take mostly males, two-thirds of the harvest in that decade, so the effect should have shown among the adult males first, and their number held13. The authors could not say which cause dominated; they think fewer young bears surviving, bears moving away and hunting have all plausibly played a part13.
Many of the missing bears, though, may have been standing on the other side of a line. Southern Hudson Bay was surveyed in the same weeks, and its estimate rose by 223 bears while Western Hudson Bay’s fell by 22413. (Southern Hudson Bay’s headline figure for 2021 is 1,119 bears; counted the same way as in 2016 it is 1,003, against 780 that year6.) Pooled, the two subpopulations came to 1,622 bears in 2016 and 1,621 in 202114.
A genetic study led by Canada’s environment ministry then followed individual bears. In 2021, when ice lingered off the Ontario coast, a quarter of the bears sampled on the Southern Hudson Bay side were known Western Hudson Bay animals. By 2022 enough of them were back that Western Hudson Bay’s number could have risen by up to 29 percent through movement alone15. Nunavut’s environment department read that study as showing the 2021 decline was “largely due to movement of bears into SH” (Southern Hudson Bay), and recommended leaving the hunting quota of 38 bears a year unchanged14. The specialist group is more guarded. Its table puts the fall down partly to temporary movement, “as well as diminished vital rates”, meaning survival and reproduction2.
Here the sceptics have a point: a single subpopulation’s collapse can be a matter of where the lines are drawn on the map. Three things survive the concession. First, the pooled count was not flat over the whole decade: it fell from 1,892 bears in 2011 to 1,622 in 2016, when both subpopulations dropped together14. Second, movement accounts for the wrong bears. The Western Hudson Bay animals identified across the line were mostly adult males, yet the survey found as many adult males as before; the bears it was missing were females and young, and they were missing from the core of the range, not from the border zone13. (The genetic study cautions that its sampling along the coast was bound to find mostly males, which weakens this point15.) Third, the longer record does not depend on the aerial surveys. Capture-recapture work, in which bears are caught, marked and caught again, covers the core of the range and puts the number there at 1,185 in 1987 and 806 in 2011166. The specialist group assesses the subpopulation as “very likely decreased” over 1995–2021, and Southern Hudson Bay’s own entry lists “declining body condition; declining survival rates, especially for cubs-of-the-year”2. Two neighbouring populations shuffling bears between them, both losing cubs, is not a reassuring picture.
The mechanism, and why the counts lag
Polar bears live on seals, which they catch from the sea ice. Around Hudson Bay the ice melts completely every summer. The bears come ashore, where there is little to eat, and live largely off their fat until the ice forms again in autumn6. Everything else follows from the length of that fast.
In Southern Hudson Bay the ice-free season grew by about 30 days between 1980 and 20126. Western Hudson Bay is on a similar path. The specialist group’s own sea-ice figures for 1979 to 2022 show the ice retreating 4.2 days earlier each decade in spring and returning 2.8 days later each decade in autumn, with summer sea-ice area down 19.9 percent per decade2. Over those four decades that comes to about a month (own calculation), a month more ashore than the bears of forty years ago spent.
A longer fast works through the weakest first. In Western Hudson Bay it has shown up as lighter adult females, as fewer cubs and as fewer young bears surviving6. A model of each bear’s energy budget, run over 42 years of observed sea ice, reproduced those trends and the fall in numbers; its authors call energy the single limiting mechanism17. The total falls later, as small cohorts of young bears grow up into a shrinking class of breeding females. The authors of the 2021 survey warn that those effects may work through over the next decade13. The total is the last number to move, which weakens the argument that the ice has been shrinking for forty years and the bears are still there.
The two that grew, and the one that held up
Set every subpopulation that has a trend against the ice it has lost, and the picture is less tidy than either side would like.
Ice loss against trend, for the eleven subpopulations that have one
Change in summer sea-ice area per decade, 1979–2022, relative to the 1991–2020 average, ordered from least to most ice lost. The word after each bar is the group’s short-term trend. The two that grew lost little ice; the six stable ones are spread across the whole range, from the smallest loss to the largest.
Show the numbers
| Subpopulation | Summer sea-ice area, % change per decade | Short-term trend |
|---|---|---|
| Viscount Melville Sound | −4.6% | likely stable |
| Southern Hudson Bay | −7.7% | likely stable |
| M’Clintock Channel | −9.5% | likely increased |
| Kane Basin | −11.2% | likely increased |
| Foxe Basin | −16.2% | likely stable |
| Gulf of Boothia | −16.2% | likely stable |
| Western Hudson Bay | −19.9% | very likely decreased |
| Davis Strait | −21.4% | likely decreased |
| Barents Sea | −23.5% | likely stable |
| Southern Beaufort Sea | −31.2% | likely decreased |
| Chukchi Sea | −31.5% | likely stable |
M’Clintock Channel and Kane Basin are near the low end for ice loss, and each comes with an explanation of its own. M’Clintock Channel, in the group’s words, “was managed for recovery with harvest below sustainable rates”2. A survey in 2000 found 284 bears; after a hunting moratorium and lower quotas, the next one found 7166. It is the 1973 story again, a generation later. Kane Basin’s increase comes with a caution. More bears were recorded in its eastern reaches in 2012–14 than in the 1990s surveys. That, the group writes, “may reflect differences in spatial distribution” of the bears, possibly because Greenland hunted less in the east, and “some differences in sampling protocols between decades”, and not more animals. It adds that “some caution should be taken in the interpretation of population growth”2.
M’Clintock Channel’s entry, like that of its stable neighbour the Gulf of Boothia, also notes something that complicates the simple story from the other side: in the high Arctic, the shift from thick multi-year ice to annual ice “provides likely improved habitat productivity at present”2. Thick old ice is poor habitat. The group’s report blames large expanses of it, and a low density of seals, for the low growth rate of Kane Basin’s bears in the 1990s, and it expects thinner ice to be more productive6. For a while, warming makes some of the Arctic better for bears, and the sceptics are right to point to it. The key words are at present: the report calls such benefits transient6. They are a stage on the way from too much ice to not enough.
The strongest single case against the idea that ice decides everything is the Chukchi Sea. It has lost 31.5 percent of its summer ice area per decade, the worst on the entire table, and its bears are assessed as likely stable, in good condition and with plenty of young2. The reason appears to be that the Chukchi shelf is exceptionally productive6: there are so many seals that even a shortened season on the ice still produces a fat bear. The Barents Sea makes a second case. Around Svalbard, a study of 770 adult bears caught between 1995 and 2019 found that body condition fell until 2000 and improved afterwards, while the sea ice went quickly; its authors suggest that more harbour seals, reindeer and walrus may partly make up for lost access to seals on the ice18. Ice loss tightens a budget, and some regions started with a much larger one.
The verdict
Take the claim apart, and its mirror image with it, and score each line.
Claim: there are more polar bears now than in the 1960s. Probably true, but unverifiable. The 1960s figure was an acknowledged guess; the modern figure is a modelled range. The journalist who put the question to researchers in 2008 reported agreement that numbers had in all likelihood risen over the previous decades, though not fivefold7. The multiplier is not a real number.
Claim: so climate change is not hurting polar bears. This does not follow. Where numbers rose, as in the Barents Sea, they rose because the shooting was curbed, and the best-counted population has been shrinking. Crediting a warming Arctic with a recovery that hunting law produced gets the cause wrong.
Claim: the population is growing. Not supported. Three subpopulations are declining, two are increasing, six are stable, and nine have no assessable trend. There is no global census, and the group’s table gives no basis for any statement about a global direction, up or down.
Claim: polar bears are dying out. Also not supported, and the sceptics are right to keep saying so. The Vulnerable listing rests on a projection driven by modelled sea-ice loss. Across its six scenarios the median probability that the global population falls by more than 30 percent over three generations is about 71 percent, with a range from 20 to 95 percent; the probability of a fall by more than half is about 7 percent1219. Three generations are 35 to 41 years, so this is a forecast, not a description of the present19. A species whose current estimates add up to more than twenty-four thousand bears is not on the edge.
So the claim is half right, and it is the half that does not carry its conclusion. Where polar bear numbers went up, hunting law did it. What they are doing now cannot be said, because four subpopulations have no estimate at all, five more have no usable trend, and counting bears across vast stretches of moving ice is expensive and difficult6.
Buried inside the sceptical claim is a fair complaint: the evidence is far thinner than two decades of confident polar-bear imagery implied, and the people who made the bear a mascot did the science no favours by overstating what was known. The answer to that is not a mascot pointing the other way.
The remedy is to fund the surveys and so improve the data.
Sources
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “Protection History”, a table reprinted from Oran Young and Gail Osherenko (eds.), Polar Politics, 1993, retrieved 2 October 2026. Entries for September 1965 and January 1968. ↩︎ ↩︎
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “Status Table for the World’s Polar Bear Subpopulations”, version 20241007, October 2024. Still the latest version on the group’s website on 2 October 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “Scientific Report on Polar Bear Conservation Status and Research Efforts”, presentation to the Meeting of the Parties to the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, 20–23 January 2026. Slides on the status table and its update of October 2025; the updated table itself is not on the group’s website. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Eric V. Regehr, Steven Baryluk, John Boulanger, Marsha Branigan, Faye d’Eon-Eggertson, Jodie Pongracz, Adam Thom and Evan S. Richardson, “Modeling movements improves capture–recapture estimates for mobile species with sparse data: Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Viscount Melville sound”, Population Ecology 67(1), pp. 75–90, published online October 2024. Abstract. ↩︎ ↩︎
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Kristin L. Laidre, Tiago A. Marques, Benjamin Cohen, Rikke G. Hansen, Eric V. Regehr, Marie J. Zahn, Jon Aars, Jasmine Ware, Harry L. Stern and Fernando Ugarte, “First abundance estimate for the east Greenland polar bear subpopulation”, Endangered Species Research 59, pp. 1–18, 12 March 2026. Abstract. ↩︎
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “Status Report on the World’s Polar Bear Subpopulations”, October 2024. Sections “Ecoregions”, “Assessing Global Status”, “Chukchi Sea (CS)”, “Gulf of Boothia (GB)”, “Kane Basin (KB)”, “M’Clintock Channel (MC)”, “Southern Hudson Bay (SH)” and “Western Hudson Bay (WH)”. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Peter Dykstra, “Magic Number: a Sketchy ‘Fact’ About Polar Bears Keeps Going…And Going… And Going”, SEJournal, Society of Environmental Journalists, Summer 2008. Quotes Stirling and Larsen. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife and University of Alaska, “Proceedings of the First International Scientific Meeting on the Polar Bear”, Fairbanks, 6–10 September 1965, Resource Publication 16, Washington, 1966. Canadian Wildlife Service brief, p. 11; paper of the Soviet delegation, p. 42. ↩︎ ↩︎
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “Harvest”, retrieved 2 October 2026. ↩︎
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M. E. Obbard, G. W. Thiemann, E. Peacock and T. D. DeBruyn (eds.), “Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 15th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group”, Occasional Paper of the IUCN Species Survival Commission No. 43, 2010. Norway’s national report, p. 153. ↩︎
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“Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears”, Oslo, 15 November 1973, text on the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group’s site. Articles I, III and IV. ↩︎
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IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, “IUCN Redlist”, reproducing the summary of the 2015 Red List assessment by Wiig et al., retrieved 2 October 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
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Stephen N. Atkinson, John Boulanger, Mitch Campbell, Vicki Trim, Jasmine Ware and Amélie Roberto-Charron, “Aerial survey of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation 2021”, final report, Government of Nunavut, Department of Environment, 16 November 2022, copy filed with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. Sections 4.4 and 5.4, table 12. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Government of Nunavut, Department of Environment, submission to the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board on the 2021 survey and the community consultations for the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation, filed for the board’s meeting of 30–31 October 2024. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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D. McGeachy, N. J. Lunn, J. M. Northrup, V. Trim, C. Davis and A. E. Derocher, “Distributional shifts of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Hudson Bay in relation to sea ice dynamics, 2017-2022”, final report, Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2023, copy filed with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. Executive summary and p. 14. ↩︎ ↩︎
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Nicholas J. Lunn, Sabrina Servanty, Eric V. Regehr, Sarah J. Converse, Evan Richardson and Ian Stirling, “Demography of an apex predator at the edge of its range: impacts of changing sea ice on polar bears in Hudson Bay”, Ecological Applications 26(5), 2016, pp. 1302–1320. Abstract. ↩︎
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Louise C. Archer, Stephen N. Atkinson, Nicholas J. Lunn, Stephanie R. Penk and Péter K. Molnár, “Energetic constraints drive the decline of a sentinel polar bear population”, Science 387(6733), pp. 516–521, 31 January 2025. Abstract. ↩︎
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Jon Aars, E. N. Ieno, M. Andersen, A. E. Derocher, Ø. Wiig and A. F. Zuur, “Body condition among Svalbard Polar bears Ursus maritimus during a period of rapid loss of sea ice”, Scientific Reports 16, article 2182, 29 January 2026. Abstract. ↩︎
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Eric V. Regehr, Kristin L. Laidre, H. Resit Akçakaya, Steven C. Amstrup, Todd C. Atwood, Nicholas J. Lunn, Martyn Obbard, Harry Stern, Gregory W. Thiemann and Øystein Wiig, “Conservation status of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to projected sea-ice declines”, Biology Letters 12(12), article 20160556, 2016. Abstract. ↩︎ ↩︎
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