The United States Fish and Wildlife Service have declared Thursday that they will be executing a plan to save the diminishing number of the world’s polar bears.
A plan called the Draft Polar Bear Conservation Management Plan will be submitted officially by nonprofit organizations along with stakeholders from both the public and private sectors this week. On a more important note, this plan will be focusing on considerable efforts for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Because of Arctic warming that has caused a significant loss of habitat due to melting sea ice; polar bears have been included under the Endangered Species Act since 2008.
Not only is this proposal focused on the substantial reduction of man-made pollution, but it also plans on helping the bears minimize their exposure to hazardous environmental conditions like oil spills along with keeping them out of human interference which can at point in the future have a conflicting outcome. As bears these days are mostly spending their time hunting for food on land, they are now more exposed to human conflict.
The scientific model created in 2008 has been updated in 2010 demonstrating a radical change in polar bear population. This revised model then added the issue of harmful greenhouse gas emission where one of the scenarios predicted that global warming will stabilize by mid-century whereas the other shows that there will be prolonged emission affection the population of polar bear, resulting in a substantial decline by the year 2050.
Only if the greenhouse gas emission were to become steady at a lower level, then there is a possibility of the polar bears surviving longer, as stated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. It is bad enough that these bears are at a loss of their habitat due to rapid meltdown of ice, but they also have food constraints as ringed seals are also undergoing a decline in population. This is why the bears are forced to swim for long distances in search of prey and along the process they suffer through malnutrition and lose their winter fat reserves.
The chances of polar bears ceasing to exist are very high where this draft comes into action presenting the hope which would help to eradicate these damaging factors caused by man-made population and preserve the bears’ habitats for good, while upholding their habitat and food source.
This proposal is a team effort for executing this plan that has been formulated by Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia.
