Nunavut against plan to list polar bears as endangered               

IQALUIT, Nunavut (CP) - The latest salvo in what could become a long and bitter fight over listing polar bears as a threatened species has been fired by the government of Nunavut.

Nunavut has made its opposition to such a move official by submitting a response to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Late last year, the U.S. government said it would consider listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It justified the review by suggesting climate change is slowly melting the Arctic sea ice, robbing the bears of their habitat. Some studies have suggested that summer sea ice could be gone by the middle of this century.

Nunavut's submission acknowledges that the climate has warmed and the sea ice has diminished since about 1979. But the territory also says neither science nor observation by the Inuit has provided evidence to support listing all of the world's populations of polar bears as threatened.

"Nunavut has a very effective polar bear management system," Environment Minister Patterk Netser said in a release Thursday. "We are managing our polar bear populations on a sustainable basis, in a way that provides economic benefits to Nunavummiut (residents of the territory)."

Most polar bear populations in Nunavut are abundant and appear to be able to withstand current hunting levels, said Netser, who suggested the U.S. move has more to do with politics than concern for the bears.

"Polar bears have become a political tool for environmental groups trying to force a change in U.S. climate change policy," he said. "We oppose the listing of polar bears because it is currently unwarranted, highly speculative and will hurt Inuit and our economy."

But the issue has nothing to do with current numbers, said a polar bear expert.

"People are trying to muddy the waters," said Andy Derocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta.

"Nobody in the polar bear world has ever objected to the notion that some populations are large. It's the longer-term context for the species that's really the main issue of the threatened status."

The numbers now are fine, but may not be in the future, said Derocher.

The concern is that in the next 45 years, which is about three generations, the loss of sea ice will cripple the bear population and diminish it to that of an endangered species.

"If the projection models . . . come to fruition, it's very clear that polar bears have a very high likelihood of slipping from a threatened status into an endangered status in many parts of the Arctic."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has received more than 500,000 comments so far on the matter, said Scott Schliebe, a spokesman in Anchorage, Alaska.

The service will not reply to anyone at this point, he said, although each comment will need to be evaluated and informally responded to during the public comment process.

With more than a half-million submissions, the Fish and Wildlife Service has its work cut out for it, and there are looming deadlines.

"Our ultimate deadline is January of 2008 and it's a statutory requirement for the agency to make a final decision," said Schliebe. "Obviously we've got some other internal deadlines that precede that."

A complete review of the comments and draft legislation will likely be released this fall. Many of the submissions so far have been electronically generated as a result of environment websites and those predictably are supporting the government initiative, said Schliebe.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2007/04/12/3992993-cp.html