Sea Change

Churchill, perched on the shores of Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, seems like an awfully long way to go to see firsthand the effects of climate change. To the north of the community is tundra and the Canadian Arctic. To the south are Wapusk National Park and the northern edge of the Borealis Forest. More famously, the town is known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Built on the ancient migratory path of a population of the world’s largest land carnivores, the city is also a hub of sorts for research focused on climate change.

I travelled to Churchill with RSA as part of its ‘Seeing is Believing Tour.’ The insurer recently held a competition for its staff members in its branches around the world, seeking ‘green’ ideas that fell in line with RSA’s corporate social responsibility efforts. As a reward, the 12 winners, from Oman, India and the United Kingdom, travelled to Canada’s subarctic, hosted by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to see firsthand the polar bears that occupy the area and the impact climate change is having on the survival of these beasts. I got to tag along, one of four journalists from around the world invited to join the expedition.

When I told people about the trip, I was always met with confusion. ‘What does an insurance company have to do with climate change, polar bears and WWF?’

RSA and WWF formed a partnership two years ago; the onset of global warming provided the motivation. Weather patterns upon which insurers rely to underwrite residential and commercial property risks are shifting. Storms causing insured property damage are more severe, more frequent and – worst of all from an insurer’s point of view – increasingly unpredictable. Insurers price their products based on an ability to predict what they will have to pay out in claims. The more unpredictable the claims damage, the harder it is for an insurer to fix a stable price for the coverage. Insurers thrive on any information or data enabling them to detect potential patterns in claims costs. And so partnering with an organization that approaches the issue of climate change from a scientific, measured approach makes good business sense for an insurance company, explained David Weymouth, RSA’s Group Operations and Risk director and a host of the event.

How is climate change affecting the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurers? Quebec’s financial services regulator released the results of a survey in October 2011 that found severe weather and climate change are calling into question insurers’ pricing assumptions and creating case overloads when responding to large catastrophic events (claims totalling more than $25 million). The survey heard back from nine insurers representing 61% of the Quebec property and casualty market. The reaction of the industry to climate change and the risks it poses runs the gamut, the study said. “Most insurers have integrated climate change into their risk management plan and have taken it into account when formulating their strategy,” the report says. “From among those who are the most proactive and forward-thinking in this group, the emerging risk of climate change has a formal place within their governance structure. However, and this is the case for the majority of them, climate change is perceived and addressed first and foremost in a traditional manner as an event of a catastrophic and repetitive nature. For a minority however, the matter is quickly dismissed, as they rely on reinsurance coverage already considered sufficient.”  

Setting out

The first leg of the journey involved staying over in Winnipeg, in preparation for a flight out to Churchill early the next morning. Chatter in four different accents fills the Lakeview Room at the Winnipeg Four Points Sheraton. We’ve piled in for our orientation dinner.

Shawn DeSantis, executive vice president of RSA Insurance in Canada and the co-host of the trip, offers words of welcome and some good-natured advice to his international guests. “It’s not so much a case of whether or not you’ll be able to outrun a polar bear, but whether or not you’ll be able to outrun your teammates if we encounter a polar bear,” he jokes. He introduces us to Derek Kyostia, our guide from Frontiers North Adventures, to give us a true sense of exactly what we can expect.

The town of Churchill, Derek explains, is built on an ancient migratory path of polar bears. In the spring, when the sea ice in Hudson Bay melts, these bears are forced ashore, where they spend the summer in a sort of walking hibernation living off of their fat stores. In November, they gather along the shores of the bay, waiting for the sea ice to return. The freezing of the bay is crucial to getting the bears back out to their hunting grounds – slabs of ice on the sea, where ringed seals are plentiful, so they can rebuild the fat stores that sustain them through the summer months.

The fact that the bears appear to be smaller physically now, and also the reality that they are onshore for longer periods of time, suggest the bears are not able to build up their fat stores that they rely on over the summer months. The lack of sea ice in itself suggests evidence of global warming. Polar bears, in this respect, may be our proverbial canaries in a coal mine.

The town of Churchill has 900 people, Derek says. At this time of the year, the polar bear population in the area is 1,200.

“When you’re out walking, take the corners wide,” he advises. “Avoid the fume vents from restaurants. Avoid alleys. No one locks their vehicles or their houses so if you see a polar bear, get inside the closest building or vehicle possible. Don’t worry about it, the locals will understand why you’re in their house. At 10 p.m., you’ll hear an air raid siren. That’s curfew for anyone under 16. At night, if you hear the sound of shots or firecrackers, don’t go running out with your camera to see what the commotion is about. It means that there’s a bear that’s gotten too close to the perimeter of the town, and the Polar Bear Alert patrol is attempting to scare it away. Remember these rules, and you’ll have an amazing time.”

Touching Down

I step off the airplane onto the snowy tarmac at Churchill’s airport. The wind whips my face and stings my cheeks. The grey sky fuses with the flat brown, grey and white land. Old-growth trees stand in small clusters no higher than four or five feet high. The prevailing northeast winds have decimated any branches or growth along one side of their spindly trunks. They’re called ‘flag trees’ because the branches that do grow reach to one side, like a triangular swath of fabric on a flagpole. In a landscape like the tundra, with no obvious landmarks, these trees would serve as a compass.

We’re ushered into the small terminal, where the host team from WWF greets us. Pete Ewins, WWF-Canada’s senior species officer, and Geoff York, WWF’s Arctic Program’s senior program officer for polar bear conservation, will be with us for the duration of the trip. We board an old school bus retrofitted with Greyhound seats and our tour begins. Our driver, dressed in camouflage, says that since we’re running late, we’ll take the back roads into town. He keeps revving the engine to keep it from stalling. We pass by a grey building with what looks like rusty patches on its walls.

“This building on the left, that’s our waste transfer station, which is a fancy word for an indoor garbage dump,” he shouts over the sputtering engine. “The bears kept breaking through the structure, so the town took some old tanks from when it was a military base and crushed ’em down and used them as reinforcements to keep the bears out. That’s recycling for ya.”

We pass several green ‘Polar Bear Alert’ signs. These signs mark the perimeter of the ‘control zone.’ The town of Churchill has partnered with Manitoba Conservation, Polar Bears International and WWF to create what Geoff describes as “the gold standard” in programs to minimize “human-polar bear conflicts.” Officer s patrol the perimeter of the community 24/7, keeping an eye out for a bear that’s wandering a bit too close to town. If they see one, the first level of response is to use the sound of flare guns, firecrackers or starter pistols to scare it off.  The second level of response is to capture the bear and place it in a holding facility, dubbed ‘Polar Bear Jail’ by the locals.

We round a corner and stretching out before us is an expanse of grey, choppy water – The Bay. By now it should be a thick layer of ice, Pete says. Apparently, the formation of ice has occurred later each year and the ice has broken up sooner, forcing bears stranded ashore to push the fat stores they live off over the summer to the extreme.

The Bear Drop

That afternoon, we go on what’s called a bear drop. Persistent bears that don’t heed the conservation officers’ warning shots are brought to ‘Polar Bear Jail,’ an airplane hanger-like structure on the edge of town. Inside, the bears are kept in isolation with minimal human contact. They are given water to drink but not food, so the bears don’t develop a positive association with captivity. Once the holding facility reaches its maximum capacity, or if a bear has been held for a while (on average, they lose two to four kilograms of body mass a day while being held), Manitoba Conservation move the bear by helicopter 70 kilometres north to Seal River, located on the Manitoba-Nunavut border.

At the Hudson Bay Helicopter headquarters, we’re prepped by Steven Amstrup of Polar Bears International. He points to a map of the Hudson Bay area. “The bears are working their way along the north-south coastline, until they get to here,” he says, pointing to the notch of land on which Churchill sits. “And then there’s this bite in the coast. That kind of stalls them out, and it’s an obvious loitering area.” A combination of salt and fresh water draining into the area results in sea ice formation, giving the bears a place to get out on the sea ice and start to hunt.

We pile into the helicopter. Chuck, our pilot, shows us how to work the safety belts, the location of the emergency beacon and where the gun is kept. Suddenly, it all feels very real. The helicopter blades whir, we lift off and my stomach drops. Our first stop is Polar Bear Jail. We stand to the side, and a garage door opens. An ATV pulls an 880-pound bear, fast asleep on a piece of plywood, into the yard. Five officers, some armed, lift the edge of the board and the bear slumps off onto a net laid out on the ground. They slide a black headband over its eyes to protect it from the wind. A helicopter lowers, a tow rope attached to the net is hooked up to the chopper and up goes the bear. One of the officers reaches up and pats the bear on the face as it’s being swooped away. We pile back in to our helicopter, and Chuck gives chase to the chopper towing the bear. We glide along the bay and ice patches dot the shore. As we approach the drop point, ‘The Node,’ Chuck swings the helicopter into a corkscrew motion over the area. “This is just to check and scare off any wolves or bears in the area. If they sense a vulnerable bear, they’ll attack it,” his voice crackles over the headset.

We land. The wind whips across the tundra. Underfoot, a moss-like cover and snow soften each step. The bear is lowered into position. Once the conservation officers ensure he is sufficiently groggy, we’re waved over. Bob Windsor, a Manitoba Conservation officer, has dragged a circle in the snow with his boot roughly three feet from the bear. By now, the bear is awake, but doesn’t have the energy to get up. He raises his head, licks the snow with his thick black tongue and looks right at me. I shuffle to the right, and his head and eyes follow. I’m reminded that he hasn’t eaten since June.

More bears have been relocated recently, Steve says. Normally, they don’t bother humans and just hunker down for the summer and conserve energy. But lately, given the prolonged periods of time they’ve been stranded onshore, they are coming into contact with communities like Churchill along the coast or industrial sites like mines. In cash-and-resource strapped locales, the only option is to slay the bear.

Juan Montalvo, a freelance photographer hired by RSA, lies on his stomach on the edge of the ‘safety circle.’  Typically with wildlife photography, a long telephoto lens is required to get a good close-up. Laying nose-to-nose with the bear, Juan relies on his 17 mm wide angle lens to fit the bear’s head in the frame. He admits that he’s “pretty nervous taking the shot.”  The bear begins to shuffle his back legs, and Bob suggests it’s time to re-board our helicopters.