Polar bears at risk as warming thaws icy home

LONGYEARBYEN, May 22 (Reuters) Time may be running out for polar bears as global warming melts the ice beneath their paws.

Restrictions or bans on hunting in recent decades have helped protect many populations of the iconic Arctic carnivore, but many experts say the long-term outlook is bleak.

An estimated 20,000-25,000 bears live around the Arctic -- in Canada, Russia, Alaska, Greenland and Norway -- and countries are struggling to work out ways to protect them amid forecasts of an accelerating thaw.

''There will be big reductions in numbers if the ice melts,'' Jon Aars, a polar bear expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said by the fjord in Longyearbyen on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole.

Unusually for this time of year, the fjord is ice free.

Many restaurants and shops in Longyearbyen, a settlement of 1,800 people, have a stuffed polar bear or pelt -- often shot before a hunting ban from the early 1970s. Self-defence is now the only excuse for killing a bear.

Many scientific studies project that warming, widely blamed on emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, could melt the polar ice cap in summer, with estimates of the break-up ranging from decades to sometime beyond 2100.

Bears' favourite hunting ground is the edge of the ice where they use white fur as camouflage to catch seals.

''If there's no ice, there's no way they can catch the seal,'' said Sarah James of the Gwich'in Council International who lives in Alaska. ''Gwich'in'' means ''people of the caribou'', which is the main source of food for about 7,000 indigenous people in Alaska and Canada.

THREATENED US President George W Bush's administration is due to decide in January 2008 whether to list polar bears as ''threatenend'' under the Endangered Species Act.

That would bar the government from taking any action jeopardising the animals' existence and environmentalists say it would spur debate about tougher US measures to curb industrial emissions.

The World Conservation Union last year listed the polar bear as ''vulnerable'' and said the population might fall by 30 per cent over the next 45 years. Bears also suffer from chemical contaminants that lodge in their fat.

Some indigenous peoples, who rely on hunts, say many bear populations seem robust.

''The Russians thought there's more polar bears that they're seeing in their communities, so they felt that it's not an endangered species,'' said Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Youth Council, of an area of Arctic Russia.

MORE REUTERS SYU VV0910