Human-polar bear conflict is increasing as bears spend more time on land due to sea ice loss, requiring community-based approaches that protect both human safety and individual bear welfare.
Human-polar bear conflict management is a welfare challenge for both species. Bears deterred, captured, or killed during human encounters experience significant welfare costs — fear, injury, and for bears lethally removed, death. The underlying driver is climate-forced habitat change compelling bears into human communities in search of food during longer ice-free seasons. Community-based conflict management that minimizes deterrence events through early warning and human behavior change, uses non-lethal deterrence methods when encounters do occur, and provides temporary holding rather than lethal removal when possible, represents the most welfare-positive approach achievable under current conditions. Long-term conflict reduction requires climate action addressing the sea ice loss that is driving bears into communities in the first place.