Tag Archives: alaska

Arctic ocean acidification: winners and losers

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Today at the international conference on Arctic Ocean Acidification, we’re talking about socioeconomic issues. The increasing acidity of Arctic waters is a complex story where  some marine species will be winners (adapting and thriving) and others losers (to the point of extinction). As for humans, we stand to lose big –ocean acidification is likely to impact the abundance, productivity and distribution of Arctic fisheries.
More acidic Arctic waters will affect everything from the price of fish, to the cost of fishing, to the benefits of fisheries to the indigenous populations of the Arctic. With a multi-billion dollar fishing industry and a large subsistence population that relies heavily on ocean resources for the majority of their dietary protein, Alaska is particularly vulnerable. If ocean acidification takes the fisheries out of western Alaska where communities live on what the land and the sea provide, food security will become a serious challenge.
To buy some time and adapt to the changing chemistry of Arctic waters, it’s important to manage the other stressors impacting Arctic ecosystems. That means policies to counteract the effects of ocean acidification must consider other human impacts, like increased shipping in the Arctic.

 “A key solution is to help the Arctic ecosystems to help themselves by decreasing all the other pressures. We need to collaborate with the ecosystems”

– Sam Dupont, lead author of the biological chapter of the Arctic Ocean Acidification assessment of the Arctic Council
The services provided by ecosystems have real economic value.  Acidification means that the very chemistry of these ecosystems are changing rapidly. But by planning for marine ecosystems that can remain resilient in the face of rapid change, we can ensure that species adapt, and the people of the Arctic don’t lose out.

Watching and waiting with windy weather: Chukchi Sea polar bear research

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Geoff York, the WWF Global Arctic Programme’s resident polar bear expert, is in the field in the Chukchi Sea, Alaska, working with bears for the 14th year in a row. Read his previous post here.

Sunday, April 3, 2011
It’s a blue sky day this morning, with the looming threat of worsening conditions later this afternoon. From the weather service map, we are in the middle of the only stretch of coast across the entire state of Alaska (more coastline than the rest of the US combined) that is under visual flight rules (VFR). Limited visibility from snow, blowing snow, or fog dominates the weather elsewhere. We find ourselves in the gap between a high pressure system over Chukotka and two deep lows pushing across the Bering Sea. With any luck, we’ll escape the snow – but we will not escape the wind. Continue reading →

RACER – The Quest to Identify Important Arctic Places in a Changing Climate

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Mush! The only race in town this past week was the Yukon Quest, a grueling dog sled endurance race of 1,000 miles from Whitehorse to Fairbanks. Our WWF team, however, was in Alaska for a different kind of expedition – consulting with some of the world’s leading interdisciplinary science and social science researchers on Arctic climate change.
Co-authored by Hussein Alidina, Peter Ewins and James Snider
Enter the world of RACER – a project of WWF’s Global Arctic Programme that seeks to identify important places in the Arctic in the face of rapid climate change. RACER stands for (deep breath) Rapid Assessment of features and areas for Circumarctic Ecosystem Resilience in the 21st Century.
For the past 18 months, a RACER team of WWF staff from Norway, Russia, USA and Canada have been reviewing key papers, consulting with experts, commissioning analyses, holding workshops, compiling digital maps and crunching data – all to develop the analyses that will identify some of the key places that will remain important for the well-being of arctic ecosystems and human communities as we experience climate change. Continue reading →

Tracking the Beaufort bears: Day 10

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Waiting out the fog in Kaktovik, Alaska.

Waiting out the fog in Kaktovik, Alaska.


WWF’s polar bear coordinator, Geoff York, keeps up his field knowledge with trips out onto the ice to check on the condition of the bears. This year, he is keeping a daily blog of his experiences over two weeks. Keep visiting this blog for regular updates and live the life of a polar bear biologist.
By Geoff York
A low ceiling keeps us on the ground again in the morning. The winds have subsided and the temperatures have risen, bringing with them some fog. The crew is getting restless, as everyone would rather be out on the ice and we are six people living in a relatively small space. Good coffee, good cooking and great attitudes make a huge difference. George and I take advantage of the additional time to connect to the local high speed internet: literally sitting outside the village school in our truck sharing their wireless system before the school day begins. A chance to at least send and receive a few emails and see what is happening in the world.
We also have a chance to reflect on the season to date and put this year’s events in the context of the project’s long term data set. The most potentially striking observations this season and last, is the decreased encounter rates of older females, sows with yearlings, and sub-adult (recently independent) bears of either gender. Some analysis by USGS will be necessary to say if this is actually a trend of any significance, but it is a troubling observation and fits all too well with the declining Southern Beaufort Sea (SBS) population projection. Finding individual bears in poor condition in any one year is not necessarily significant. Bad years happen even when times are generally good for wildlife, and all age classes of bears sometimes die for a variety of reasons, especially dependent young.
The fog lets up, and we take advantage of the window to head back up in the air and out onto the sea ice. After two days of winds gusting to 35 knots, we are surprised by the lack of ice movement. We had expected, and hoped, to see new leads as this can concentrate bear hunting activity – but no such luck. The winds have scoured some pans down to glare ice as well. In short order we encounter five ringed seals hauled out in close vicinity to one another, more than we had seen in over a week and a welcome sign.
As we make our way to the north, we catch up to the fog and are turned eastward. Our pilot happens to see a set of tracks crossing a pressure ridge, and we are off in pursuit. Within five minutes we have a large male in sight, and he seems completely unconcerned by our presence. This behavior is not unusual for mature breeding males as they have few peers on the sea ice. Once we have him safely sedated, we discover this bear is a well known to us from previous captures. He is the largest bear weighed by scale in the Alaskan Beaufort at 590 kg in the fall of 1999 and he was born in the winter of 1983. Today he weighs in at 480 kg, a respectable spring weight for such a big guy, and the oldest bear we have captured this season. He is in great condition and has recently eaten as evidenced by a bulging tummy.
We depart to the SE and hunt towards the two dens we discovered previously along the coast, but it is not long before we cut another fresh set of tracks. This set also leads us directly to the track maker – a younger lone male, and also one I have seen before very near this location. I last caught this bear in 2007 during the filming of a CNN/Animal Planet piece with Jeff Corwin. At the time, this bear was only 6 years old, but he was determined to court a much older and larger bear who stood up and really let him have it. No harm was done, other than perhaps his ego! It was nice to see him as a much larger 8 year old. He is now tall, lanky, and lean as if from a recent growth spurt. He is also in reasonable condition for a male this time of year. The light winds we had all day suddenly stop and we have a beautiful evening to process and sample the last bear of the day. We land about half past seven, unload, hang and clean the gear, grab a quick dinner and enter the data. It is nearly midnight when I finish the last few tasks, print the labels and head up to bed.
WWF’s polar bear coordinator, Geoff York, keeps up his field knowledge with trips out onto the ice to check on the condition of the bears. This year, he is keeping a daily blog of his experiences over two weeks. Keep visiting this blog for regular updates, photos, and maybe some video too, and live the life of a polar bear biologist.

‘Indigenous peoples need to be heard’

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Delegates from South America talk about impacts in Amazonia

Delegates from South America talk about impacts in Amazonia


People from around the world have gathered in Anchorage, Alaska this week for the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change. WWF Arctic Programme’s Head of Communications, Clive Tesar is there, and is filing reports all this week.
“There is no way that the people who created the problem of climate change should be allowed to sidestep their responsibility … we should never leave them one minute or one hour to feel comfortable in their neglect.”
Cletus Springer, a spokesman for the Caribbean region said clearly what many at this gathering felt.  As the Inuit leader Patricia Cochran put it, Indigenous peoples have seemed to be invisible in the debate on global warming, yet the the testimony of Indigenous peoples from around the world shows that they are disproportionately feeling the impacts.
Speakers from the South Pacific spoke of crops are withering in the heat, delegates from the Caribbean spoke of  living in fear of increasingly violent and frequent storms, and people from the Arctic spoke of the sudden, sometimes deadly unpredictability of time worn travel routes.
Delegates from a rainbow of cultures filled the Summit room

Delegates from a rainbow of cultures filled the Summit room


WWF’s Arctic Programme contributed money to this conference, because we believe that the Indigenous peoples need to be heard. Personally, I was raised in the north, and have lived among people who still rely heavily on the land. I know that the changes on the land are hitting people hard.
It is not just the economy of Indigenous settlements. It goes deeper than that, down to a very real fear that people have of changes on the land so profound that they become strangers to their own lands.
The encouraging thing is that the people here, and many of the people they represent, are not passively waiting for the changes to come. They refuse to be victims of a problem they did little to create. As the week goes on, people here are working collectively on a declaration that will outline how they plan to take their concerns onto the world stage, and to ensure that nobody can “feel comfortable in their neglect”.