Thin Ice Blog
Latest blog entries
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Learning to keep bears and people safe
Femke Koopmans from WWF-Netherlands joined the Arctic Programme's Geoff York to learn from the international community the best ways to prevent conflict between bears and people.
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Partnering for polar bears
The value of partnerships for Arctic conservation: dispatches from the International Polar Year conference.
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Presenting polar science at IPY2012
WWF is not only attending this week's International Polar Year conference, but also contributing to the wealth of polar science presented there.
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Looking back: The lessons of IPY
The Polar Research Board (PRB) is taking a look back at the lessons and legacies of a pivotal International Polar Year with a new report.
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Turning knowledge to action: International Polar Year
WWF's Global Arctic Programme is at the International Polar Year conference in Montreal, Canada.
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A bear “dining room” keeps a village safe
Despite temperatures well below freezing, Cape Kozhevnikov is bustling. The Umky Patrol is hard at work, using tractors and snowmobiles to transport frozen walrus carcasses and pile them outside town.
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Who is an expert on the Arctic?
Academic conferences such as this one are filled with experts. Experts in anthropology, law, sociology, education and several more disciplines. How do we know they’re expert? Because the vast majority have letters after their name that tell us so – there are more doctors here than in your average hospital (though I wouldn’t want these doctors performing surgery on me). But when it comes to telling the world about the Arctic, are these the right sort of experts?
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Denying climate change in Alaska and Kamchatka
Climate change would be called undeniable, if it wasn’t for the fact that so many people do deny it. In southern Alaska, large percentages of republican voters deny that it’s happening, according to a large phone survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire. The survey was presented here at the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences in Akureyri Iceland.
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The rest of the world and the Arctic
One of the struggles at the heart of discussion of the Arctic is over who has the right be there, and to use arctic resources. Most of the governments that ring the Arctic Ocean are busily working on claims that will extend their rights to the sea bed. The question is, who else has the right to be there once all the claims are adjudicated? The UN convention on the law of the sea doesn’t settle the questions of shipping, or even all the questions about fishing.
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Tracking megafauna in Iceland
Some people say WWF spends too much time talking about charismatic megafauna (a fancy way of saying interesting big animals). There is a reason we do that; if that’s what interests people then that’s how we start the conversation about conservation. In the Arctic, you’ll see us talking about walrus, about whales, and of course about polar bears. But I’m in Akureyri, Iceland right now to talk about another species of charismatic arctic megafauna – people.
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