Travelers on a polar bear excursion with Frontiers North Adventures Jessica Burtnick In half a century, the region may look little like it does right now, and the specter of warming has raised difficult questions for a town whose economy revolves around polar bear tourism. Today, Churchill is often counted among Australia’s bleaching Great Barrier Reef and flooding Venice as a “last-chance” tourism destination imperiled by climate change. Already, the number of bears living in Western Hudson Bay has declined by roughly 30 percent since the late 1980s.

By 2100-without dramatic intervention-it's inevitable that the population will collapse. But Churchill’s location also means that the polar bears here are among the most vulnerable to global warming.īiologists with the University of Toronto and Polar Bears International (PBI), a non-profit conservation organization, recently reported that polar bears living in the Western Hudson Bay region are very likely to experience reproductive failure by 2060 as the sea ice disappears. Svalbard, Norway, and Alaska, two other polar bear locales accessible to humans, require traveling by cruise ship-or a whole lot of luck-for successful spottings. Churchill’s southerly location in the sub-Arctic makes it the most convenient place to see polar bears in the world, with an entire industry dedicated to bear-viewing.

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