Polar bears are emblematic of climate change impacts on wildlife, with individual welfare consequences that accompany population-level declines.
Climate change is causing prolonged fasting periods in polar bears that extend beyond the natural summer fast and cause chronic nutritional stress. Individual bears that must swim longer distances between shrinking ice floes experience exhaustion and sometimes drown. Hungry bears increasingly enter human settlements, creating safety conflicts that typically end in bear deaths. The welfare of individual polar bears is directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions in a chain of causation that spans the globe and requires global responses.