The global polar bear population is currently estimated at around 26,000, but the real story is more complicated than a single number suggests. There is no reliable historical baseline to measure a straightforward decline against, and the 19 recognized subpopulations across the Arctic are each on different trajectories. Some have declined sharply, others appear stable, and many simply lack enough data to say.
Why There’s No Simple “Before and After”
You may have seen claims that polar bears numbered as few as 5,000 in the 1960s and have since rebounded. That figure traces back to a single Russian extrapolation from 1956 that was never accepted by the scientific community. The truth is that in the 1960s, nobody had a reliable count of polar bears across the Arctic. Surveying animals that roam vast stretches of sea ice, often alone, across multiple national jurisdictions was simply beyond the tools available at the time.
What we do know is that some populations grew after new protections took effect in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Canada, Alaska, and Greenland implemented harvest management systems, aerial sport hunting ended in Alaska, and commercial trapping and hunting were banned across the Arctic. Populations responded the way you’d expect when hunting pressure drops. That recovery, though, doesn’t tell us what the “natural” baseline was before commercial exploitation, and it doesn’t contradict the declines now being driven by a completely different threat: loss of sea ice.
Where Declines Are Clearest
The most dramatic and well-documented decline comes from the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation in northern Manitoba, one of the most intensively studied polar bear groups in the world. Over roughly four decades of monitoring between 1979 and 2021, this population dropped by nearly 50 percent. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough tied this directly to an extended “energy deficit,” meaning the bears simply cannot get enough food during the shortened ice season to sustain their body weight and reproduce successfully.
Western Hudson Bay is a bellwether because it sits at the southern edge of polar bear range, where warming hits first and hardest. The ice forms later in fall and breaks up earlier in spring, shrinking the window bears have to hunt seals. As the ice-free period lengthens, bears burn through their fat reserves on land with little to eat, and fewer cubs survive to adulthood.
The Davis Strait subpopulation, farther east in the Canadian Arctic, is also categorized as “likely decreased” based on surveys between 2007 and 2018. Beyond those two, the picture gets murkier. The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group classifies the majority of the 19 subpopulations as “data deficient” for long-term trends, meaning scientists don’t have enough survey data to confidently say whether those groups are growing, shrinking, or holding steady. The Chukchi Sea population, shared between Alaska and Russia, appears likely stable based on data from 2008 to 2016.
How Sea Ice Loss Threatens Survival
Polar bears depend on sea ice as a hunting platform. They wait at breathing holes or along ice edges to catch ringed seals and bearded seals, their primary prey. When ice retreats farther from shore or disappears entirely for months at a time, bears face two bad options: stay on land and fast, or swim enormous distances to reach remaining ice.
Those long swims are especially lethal for cubs. A study tracking satellite-collared females found that 11 of 20 bears making long-distance swims had young cubs with them, and five of those 11 lost their cubs during the journey. That’s a 45 percent cub mortality rate from swimming alone, on top of all the other risks cubs face.
The damage extends beyond raw numbers. Research tracking the Baffin Bay subpopulation over 25 years found that as sea ice declined, bears stopped moving between neighboring populations. In the 1990s, about a third of collared bears traveled south into Davis Strait and a similar share moved west into Lancaster Sound. By the 2000s, those movement rates dropped to just 8 percent in each direction. Genetic analysis confirmed for the first time that Baffin Bay bears were becoming measurably distinct from a neighboring group they had previously mixed with freely. This kind of isolation reduces genetic diversity over time, making populations more vulnerable to disease and less adaptable to changing conditions. Scientists expect this fragmentation pattern to repeat across the Arctic as ice loss continues.
Hunting Still Takes Around 735 Bears a Year
Fifteen of the 19 subpopulations support a legal subsistence harvest, primarily by Indigenous communities in Canada and Greenland for whom polar bear hunting holds deep cultural and nutritional significance. The annual take is roughly 735 animals from the global population of 26,000. At the species level, this harvest rate (around 4.5 percent, skewed toward males at a 2-to-1 ratio) is not currently considered a threat to the species overall.
The concern is what happens when you combine even sustainable harvest rates with a shrinking habitat. Modeling studies show that if the carrying capacity of a region drops by 7 to 14 percent per decade, as climate projections suggest for some areas, populations with low resilience face a meaningful increase in the risk of local extinction. For populations that are already small or stressed, harvest quotas that looked safe a decade ago may need to be reassessed as conditions change.
What Projections Say About the Next Few Decades
Climate models project that the global polar bear population will decrease by roughly 30 percent by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current path. That projection comes from the relationship between sea ice extent and polar bear body condition, reproduction, and survival rates. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent status review echoes this outlook, stating that continued sea ice loss is anticipated to cause population declines even though the current global estimate of 26,000 (with a confidence range of 22,000 to 31,000) remains relatively stable for now.
The losses won’t be evenly distributed. Subpopulations in the seasonal ice zones, places like Hudson Bay and Baffin Bay where ice completely disappears in summer, face the steepest declines. Populations in the high Arctic, where year-round ice persists longer, may hold on longer but are not immune. The trajectory depends almost entirely on how quickly Arctic sea ice continues to diminish, which in turn depends on global emissions. For polar bears, the question isn’t just how much the population has decreased so far. It’s how fast the declines will accelerate from here.