Polar Bear: Issues and Solutions Infographic

Polar bears populations are declining at a rate that’s sure to put them extinct or at least close to extinction in the next few decades. Scientists are even predicting that the polar bear populations will drop by 30% by the year 2050. The main culprit? Global warming. Global warming is warming up temperatures in the Arctic faster than before and with that warming, the sea ice extent has been melting at a rate of 14% every decade since the 1980s.

Reducing the amount of time polar bears have with the sea ice allows them less time to hunt and store up fat for the summer months. With the melting sea ice, it’s causing longer periods of time without sea ice and that creates problems for polar bears like reproductive failure or starvation. These are all problems caused by manmade pollution.

To combat this problem, people are obviously going to need to start producing less carbon dioxide (to reduce global warming). There are some ways you can do this like using more public transportation, (or just walking/biking more) remembering to recycle items, using more energy efficient products, not using as much air conditioning and countless more solutions. However, this will require a global effort which means governments and country leaders will need to take more action in regards to this issue. Everyone needs to participate and put in effort if they want to truly make a difference in global warming and to do that, countries need to make laws and rules to encourage their people to save the planet. Putting more effort into reducing global warming will not prove to be beneficial towards to countries however. Their factories will go through economic loss if they can’t use as much CO2 as before to produce their products. Consumers of these products will also not be satisfied because there are fewer products to buy and more demand for this product, possibly driving up inflation. The countries will not really benefit that much from reducing the amount of CO2 factories can use unless they can come up with some alternative source of energy that will 1, be able to be found easily and 2, not contribute to global warming.

Global warming is such an important and seemingly impossible to fix issue that people start to wonder if it’s already too late for us to save what’s left. Is putting in global effort really too big of a problem for us to save the polar bears?