THE HIDDEN FACE OF THE WWF – LOBBYING FOR A HUNT ON POLAR BEARS
While one part of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) collects money to save the polar bear from extinction, another pushes for polar bear hunting and the global trade in skins to continue and expand.
By Arvid Grange & Anton Baev (Systema, RFE/RL)
The ship M/S Stockholm is wedged in the pack ice directly north of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The silent, vast landscape creates a feeling of being at the end of the world. Looking at a world atlas to see where the ship is located reinforces that feeling. The map ends here.
A polar bear curiously sniffs the ship’s hull, takes a few steps back, and looks up at the vessel. Twenty-or-so human eyes stare back. They are tourists and crew. The metal snapping of cameras shatters the silent air.
The polar bear stands up on its hind legs, showing its full height. This is the world’s largest land-living predator, though it spends most of its life on the sea ice.
The bear places its paws against the railing. From there, it might possibly manage to climb aboard. Expedition guide Nikita Ovsyanikov picks up his stick and walks over to the bear. For a short moment, they look at each other.
He strikes the long stick against the steel railing. Startled, the bear runs away.
Nikita Ovsyanikov—expedition guide on ships in the Arctic Ocean, zoologist, and one of the world’s leading polar bear researchers—spent the summer months of three decades on Wrangel Island north of Siberia. There, he studied polar bears and learned to walk among them, armed only with his stick.
When he returns below deck on this August day in 2019, Nikita Ovsyanikov passes two crew members who witnessed his moment with the bear. He explains to the crew that the polar bear’s survival is not only threatened by climate warming, but also by hunting. He says that one of the organizations most responsible for polar bears being hunted unsustainably is the very organization most people consider the polar bear’s protector.
The author of this story was one of the two crew members who saw Nikita Ovsyanikov’s encounter with the polar bear and heard his exposition, where he pointed the finger at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, the WWF, claiming that they are a major lobbyist for the extensive global polar bear hunt.
This investigation was conducted by Fokus in collaboration with the investigative unit Systema at Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL), with the aim of finding out the level of truth in what Nikita Ovsyanikov said.
“Adopting a polar bear” sets you back 25 US dollars. Go up a few tens of dollars and you get a polar bear plush toy too, and a clear conscience. This is one of the World Wildlife Fund’s, WWF’s, most famous campaigns.
The polar bear functions as one of the organization’s most powerful symbols. Threatened by sea ice rapidly melting in the arctic, the image of the vulnerable polar bear encapsulates both nature’s rawness and its fragility.
Initiatives like this campaign contributes to WWF having an annual revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars. With the money, the organization pledges to protect the world’s polar bears by fighting global warming, protecting their habitat, and reducing conflicts between polar bears and humans.
Today, commercial polar bear hunting is prohibited in all countries where polar bears occur naturally. This has been the case since 1973, when an international agreement was signed after several decades of intense hunting had decimated the global polar bear population.
Yet, 700–800 polar bears are still shot every year. An exemption clause in the international ban allows indigenous peoples in the Arctic to continue subsistence hunting as a way of exercising their traditional rights.
The majority of all polar bears are hunted in Canada, where 500–600 are shot annually. In the region where almost all of this hunting occurs, Nunavut, about a fifth of the hunting quotas are sold to trophy hunters, despite the ban on commercial hunting.
For a fee of around 40 000 USD, a trophy hunter may indulge in such a hunt.
In addition to trophy hunting, the final destination for many of the “regularly” hunted bears is the international market. Of the countries that hunt polar bears—the USA, Canada, and Greenland—Canada is the only country that allows international trade.
The Canadian government remains firm in calling the hunt “subsistence hunting”, and Canada makes great efforts to protect the global trade in polar bear body parts like claws, skulls, and hides. Perhaps their most important ally in protecting this trade, and the hunting behind it, is the WWF.
“The intention of the agreement was to take care of the polar bear,” says Norwegian ecologist and polar bear researcher Thor S. Larsen.
He was one of the main architects behind the 1973 ban on polar bear hunting, and he says that the agreement worked well for a period but that the loopholes which Canada in particular exploits to continue trophy hunting and trade, are an abuse of the agreement.
Simultaneously, researchers and groups such as the WWF, primarily mention global warming and disappearing sea ice as the primary threats to the polar bear. This has been a central argument for not banning the trade—to not shift focus from the “real” threat, global warming.
Thor S. Larsen largely agrees with that assessment.
“It is quite clear today that we have climate effects affecting the polar bear that we can do nothing about. Climate is climate. But we can do something about the hunting,” he says.
Other polar bear researchers that Fokus has been in contact with point out that the polar bear as a species has survived periods of global warming before, but that the species’ chances of survival are severely worse if they simultaneously must withstand extensive hunting.
“If you add the hunting, you get a double negative effect,” says Thor S. Larsen.
One way to reduce hunting was proposed by the USA in 2010. The idea was to ban international commercial trade in polar bear body parts under the international cooperation CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), sometimes referred to as the UN of trade in wildlife.
When the votes were counted at the 2010 CITES summit, the proposal was defeated. One of the organizations that had publicly opposed it was the WWF.
The fact that WWF—despite its public image as the polar bear’s best friend—positioned itself this way has recently received media attention. In February last year, The Guardian published an article about it.
But a more complete picture of what the hidden mechanisms of lobbying look like, beyond the public eye, shows WWF’s role in this political game.
In 2013, three years had passed since the first CITES proposal for a trade ban was downvoted. It was also the 40th anniversary since the international ban against commercial polar bear hunting was signed, and in January 2013 WWF boasted that this new year was going to be the “Year of the Polar Bear.”
It was to be a “key year” for the polar bear, said WWF’s lead polar bear expert, Geoff York. He emphasized the need to “recognize and celebrate” the progress made in conserving and protecting the polar bear.
Only two months later, the next CITES conference was held. Once again, the USA presented a proposal to raise the polar bear’s protection status and ban all international commercial trade. The proposal was supported by Russia.
WWF opposed the proposal again.
This time, they had solidified this stance through science. A new research report had been produced, showing that “the major threat to polar bears is not international commercial trade.”
The complex web of lobbying reached a climax before the voting, when Canada’s EU Ambassador David Plunkett, in an open letter appealed to member states to shut down the proposal. His main argument was that WWF and the organization TRAFFIC opposed it.
TRAFFIC monitors trade in animals. Formally, it was they, and not WWF, who produced the new scientific report. But a closer look reveals a more tangled context. TRAFFIC was, in fact, founded by the WWF, in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Additionally, one of the lead researchers of the report was WWF’s own polar bear specialist, Geoff York—the same person who declared 2013 the Year of the Polar Bear. Furthermore, a look at the first pages of the report show that it was directly funded by the Canadian government’s environmental agency, the same legal body responsible for issuing the permits needed to export polar bear hides.
Permits that require scientific evidence.
The report—titled “Icon on Ice”—even refers directly to the Canadian environmental agency in matters of sustainability.
“According to Environment Canada, the level of total polar bear harvest is sustainable,” the report states.
The WWF does not, however, have voting rights at CITES. The responsibility for approving or rejecting a proposal lies with the member states. That WWF was nevertheless responsible for the proposal failing was an opinion shared by several of those who attended the conference.
The charity IWMC World Conservation Trust wrote afterward that the rejection was partly due to “WWF using its extensive influence among the parties.”
One person who saw up-close, for several years, how the WWF exercised their influence at CITES is Øystein Størkersen, who was the chairman of CITES in 2013.
Responding to the question of whether the WWF had a considerable effect on the voting result in 2013, Øystein Størkersen says that they always do.
– The WWF is one of the largest lobbyists at CITES, very clearly. They go around grouping the people they believe will vote in the same direction as themselves, as well as the ones who are unsure and the ones who are against. Then they take the unsure ones and invite them to lunches and dinners.
He continues to say that many of the member nations eligible to vote are poorer nations from the global south. Their representatives might not have a stake in polar bear issues, and gladly accept a free dinner on the unspoken premise of providing a vote.
“The WWF knows which these countries are”, Øystein Størkersen says.
Since 2010, when the first proposal for a trade ban was voted down, over 3,000 Canadian polar bears have entered the international market, according to CITES’s own database, which shows polar bears leaving the country labeled as “hides,” “rugs,” “bodies,” or “trophies.”
In recent years, exports have dipped, but polar bear hunting is still not sustainable, say several experts.
The number of polar bears worldwide is estimated at around 25,000 according to official figures. But no one knows for sure, and researchers have long suspected the number is decreasing rapidly, primarily due to climate change causing habitat loss.
“We know almost nothing about half of the populations. It is highly uncertain data. Then one could apply the precautionary principle, but that is not being done,” says Dag Vongraven, who from 2010 to 2021 was the chair of the world’s leading group of polar bear researchers, the IUCN’s Polar Bear Specialist Group.
WWF describes itself as a science-driven organization. The researcher behind their scientific report, Geoff York, writes to Fokus in an email that the report was based on robust scientific evidence, despite the government of Canada being one of the funders. He writes that at the time there was greater consensus that subsistence hunting was sustainable.
But as early as 2011, before the study was released, the Polar Bear Specialist Group had sent a warning letter to the Nunavut region, warning that hunting pressure appeared to be unsustainable.
The letter was specifically about hunting in the Western Hudson Bay area. For decades, the number of polar bears had dwindled in the western part of the northern Canadian bay. This led researchers to conclude that hunting there was likely unsustainable.
As a result of the decreasing numbers, Nunavut initially lowered the hunting quota in the area from 56 to only eight bears annually. The problem was that even eight bears was considered unsustainable, the group’s lead researcher, Dag Vongraven, wrote to Nunavut.
But almost as soon as they were lowered, the hunting quotas turned upward again. In 2011, 21 bears were allowed to be shot in the area. That was when the researchers sent their letter of heavy criticism.
WWF, as a “science-driven” organization, had not missed this in its collective assessment. The report’s authors write in passing that “some scientists and managers saw this figure as being above the limit of what is sustainable.”
Dag Vongraven, who was the chair of the research group behind the letter reacts strongly to how their criticism was presented.
“They mention that there have been disagreements and stop there. I don’t think that’s a fair way to present it. These are substantial disagreements from leading researchers,” he says.
Despite this, not even the specialist group spearheaded by Dag Vongraven was unanimously positive about the proposal for a trade ban when it was on the agenda in 2013.
It was admitted at the time that there was evidence that the pelt market had driven polar bear hunting. It was also estimated that nearly half of all the world’s polar bears would disappear by 2050. Still, the specialist group eventually opposed the proposal, despite internal divisions.
Today, Dag Vongraven’s opinion on a trade ban is clearer.
“I think it’s about time,” he says.
Thirteen years have passed since. The annual hunting quota for Western Hudson Bay—the quota the Polar Bear Specialist Group warned about in 2011—has risen from 8 to 42 polar bears.
Hunting quotas do not exist in all Canadian regions, however. In Manitoba, hunting is not allowed at all. In Quebec and Ontario, on the other hand, hunting is allowed but not limited to a quota system. Hunters choose themselves whether to report if a bear has been shot, which opens the door for unreported cases.
In the years since the CITES meeting, several Canadian polar bear hunting quotas have continued to increase, and in Nunavut in 2019, a change was made so that as many females may be shot as males. Previously, hunting was limited to half as many females as males.
“The key factor for keeping the population okay is the females, but now they have changed it so they can take as many males as females without reducing the total quota,” says Dag Vongraven.
Despite changes over the years, the WWF firmly remain where they previously stood.
Following The Guardian’s article in February 2025, the WWF wrote that they still do not consider a ban on trade in polar bear parts justified, “based on the latest available data.”
“If they say they are presenting arguments based on the best available science, that is worthy of criticism,” says Dag Vongraven. “If you are to have any opinion on polar bear conservation, you must have updated knowledge.”
Fokus has repeatedly sought the head of WWF’s global Arctic program, Vicki Lee Wallgren, for an interview. She has declined, and a WWF spokesperson has instead responded to the criticism presented.
“WWF does not work to support or promote the pelt trade,” they write in an email to Fokus. They work “together with the scientific community, governments, and indigenous peoples.”
The latter is important in this context. Inuit along Canada’s northern coasts are the ones who have the right to hunt polar bears. Even if they choose to sell a large proportion of hunting rights to trophy hunters, or sell the hides to the international luxury market, it is their right to hunt—according to law and tradition.
They have lived side by side with the polar bear for thousands of years. They make clothes from its fur and food from its meat, even if polar bear meat is no longer a staple food.
Polar bear hunting is not just a cultural thing. A local survey estimated that all Inuit regions in Canada are heavily affected by a lack of access to food. In one region, 70 percent of households lacked adequate access to food, according to a survey. Selling a polar bear hide or a trophy hunt can bring in money for oneself and the community, the representatives for the Inuit say.
WWF’s official stance on trophy hunting is that they accept it if the hunting occurs in a way that benefits both the species being hunted and the local indigenous population economically.
Fokus has tried several times to reach out to Inuit within regional polar bear management in Canada but has received no response. Their own voices can, however, be found in a variety of meeting protocols.
It is clear that from their own experience they do not recognize the rest of the world’s descriptions of the polar bear decreasing or being threatened.
At a meeting in Nunavut in 2017 to discuss new hunting quotas, one local Inuit described how polar bears have become more common over the years. People are attacked on the ramp to the local co-op store. Five different bears are found sleeping under houses in the village. Contrary to what researchers say, the bears are growing in number, say those who live there.
Researchers have countered this by explaining that the percieved increase in polar bears is a result of melting sea ice. Less ice, for fewer weeks of the year, forces the bears to spend more time on land. This makes encounters with humans more frequent.
The Inuit are afraid of bears coming into the villages, and the low hunting quotas are bad for the economy. A representative from the town of Whale Cove, which lies along the polar bears’ migration route, said during the meeting in Nunavut that they had even considered suicide because they are not allowed to hunt.
WWF thus wants to protect the indigenous population’s hunting rights.
But the claim by WWF’s spokesperson to Fokus—that they do not work “to support or promote the fur trade”—is cast in dubious light when one hears what WWF themselves say behind closed doors.
The WWF representative opened his address during the hunting quota meeting, which was closed to the public, by clarifying to local leaders and regional hunting organizations that WWF has worked to defend the international polar bear trade.
The WWF representative continues by saying that the hunt is not a threat to the Canadian polar bear population, even though at this very meeting resulted not only in the hunting quota being raised additionally, but also in a new regional framework of using hunting to reduce the number of bears.
Hunting to reduce the number of bears is by definition not sustainable, according to Dag Vongraven.
“I have no problem seeing that subsistence hunting can continue in a certain way that is sustainable, but today it is obviously not sustainable,” he says.
In an official statement, WWF said that—if the hunting occurs with the intent to reduce the number of polar bears—it is important to monitor the situation. On the whole, they support the new framework, they write.
Canada defended the raised hunting quotas in their own way. They argue that since both attempts to upgrade the polar bear’s protection status at CITES failed, that is in itself evidence that the hunt is sustainable.
At one end, then, CITES proposals for trade bans are voted down, partly because WWF runs a campaign where they explicitly claim that trade bans would not lead to fewer bears being shot. At the other end, behind closed doors, the fact that the proposal was rejected is used as a direct argument for expanding the hunt in Canada.
Only four years after this meeting in Western Hudson Bay, a new study showed that the number of polar bears in the area had decreased by nearly a third over five years. Since 1980, the population in the area has lost about half of its stock.
But it is not only in Canada, or at CITES conferences, that WWF has acted controversially. Meeting minutes from 2018, which this investigation has found, show that WWF has also tried to open up polar bear hunting where it has long been prohibited.
When the global ban on commercial polar bear hunting was introduced in 1973, all polar bear hunting had already been banned in Russia for sixteen years. Today, however, there is an agreement between the USA and Russia where the countries share an annual hunting quota for the polar bear population north of the Bering Strait. However, the quota has not been used on the Russian side, where hunting has remained prohibited.
Over the last decade, there have been discussions about opening up hunting on the Russian side. One of the parties driving that line turns out to be WWF. During a meeting in Egvekinot in eastern Russia in 2018, WWF said they wanted to see an opened polar bear hunt.
When the meeting closed, the annual quota had also been raised—from 58 bears to 85—without protest from WWF.
A person who worked closely with the US-Russia Polar Bear Commission says that even the quota of 58 bears was higher than what the commission’s own researchers considered sustainable. The quota was passed only after negotiations between the researchers and local hunters.
A protocol from 2010 seems to confirm this. It states clearly that the quota of 58 bears was adopted after the commission’s lead researchers had first proposed a significantly lower quota, which was described as “likely sustainable.”
WWF’s argument is that legal hunting will become a way to deal with Russian illegal hunting, which historically has been a big problem. In an attempt to understand how extensive the poaching is, WWF sponsored a scientific study several years ago to map illegal hunting in eastern Russia.
It was done in partnership with the local hunting organization that would be allowed to hunt if polar bear hunting became legal. The study’s author writes in a response to Fokus that he has always been in favor of traditional polar bear hunting for the indigenous population in that part of Russia, similar to what is allowed in the USA.
The study argues that the hunting ban was a mistake from the beginning, and that the extent of poaching was so close to the official hunting quota that one might as well make the hunting legal.
But since the hunting quota was subsequently raised – at the same meeting where WWF argued for an opened hunt – the legal hunt, if introduced, would be larger than the illegal one.
Since the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out in 2022, polar bear cooperation between the USA and Russia has been on pause.
The positive attitude toward polar bear hunting is an important line for WWF to maintain. A former employee at WWF describes how he received reprimands from his boss after telling the media that he wanted to see a ban on polar bear hunting in the USA, similar to the one in Russia.
“It caused a scandal that later affected my career,” says the person, who is a respected researcher.
“I was always against polar bear hunting. Polar bear hunting has been banned in Russia for 70 years. It is only beneficial for a small group of researchers and local bureaucracy,” the researcher tells Fokus.
Both this researcher and another anonymous research colleague with insight tell Fokus that around 2010, WWF arranged several trips where they invited representatives of the indigenous population in Russian Chukotka, on the other side of the Bering Strait, to communities in Alaska that were allowed to hunt polar bears for subsistence purposes.
The former WWF-affiliated researcher says that the purpose of the trips was to influence opinion to make it possible for the indigenous population in Russia to hunt polar bears legally. WWF admits to organising the trips but refute the claim that the purpose was to influence local opinion.
That the WWF is an advocate for trophy hunting and international trade is not particularly well-known. But it is neither new nor limited to polar bears. The organization’s founder, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was a prolific trophy hunter. Even recently and in other branches of WWF’s activities, this is noticeable.
In 2009, for example, WWF wrote a letter to the American equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency and argued to allow a trophy hunter to import a critically endangered black rhinoceros that he had shot in Namibia.
The trophy hunting industry was involved in starting WWF, Øystein Størkersen, the former chairman of CITES notes. But he himself had thought that the organization would have changed more over time.
“I thought it was more science that governed now... I thought,” he says.
Another well-informed person Fokus spoke with, who chose to remain anonymous, believes that one reason the WWF protects the hunt may be to maintain good relations with the communities that hunt polar bears. Without that, they lose an important presence in the Arctic.
Greenpeace and their campaign to ban seal hunting serves as an analogy. The campaign led to European sanctions against seal products, primarily from Canada. It was a hard blow to the Inuit local economy.
That campaign made Greenpeace “radioactive” in the Canadian Arctic. WWF would want to avoid meeting a similar fate.
Unlike, for example, the harp seal, whose products were banned from import to the EU in 2009, the polar bear is an animal with a more bleak future outlook. Where the harp seal is classified by the IUCN in the “least concern” category, with a population of several million in the North Atlantic, the polar bear is considered “vulnerable”, with depressing forecasts.
The polar bear is a species managed not only in Canada, but across the entire Arctic, and other Arctic countries could push for change in a different direction.
One who has tried to influence decision-makers in places other than just Canada is the Norwegian independent researcher Ole J. Liodden. He has tried to get Norway, which is one of the polar bear countries, to submit a new proposal for trade protection to CITES.
In 2019, it was discovered that Norway serves as a checkpoint for Canadian polar bears which lack legal paperwork, making them illegal. From Norway, they enter the international market anyway. Despite the Norwegian Polar Institute, part of the country’s environmental agency, recommending that Norway stop the import of Canadian polar bears, this has not happened.
At the most recent CITES conference, in late 2025, no country submitted a proposal to protect polar bears from international trade. The reason behind why a new CITES proposal was not submitted is simple, Ole J. Liodden believes.
“You can’t go to these kinds of authorities with facts. It doesn’t work. You need public opinion. I think it’s because it was voted down in 2010 and 2013,” he says.
But now, more than before, there is a need for such a trade ban, says polar bear researcher Dag Vongraven.
“The problem with polar bear hunting, especially in Canada, is that it allows export,” he says.
When Nikita Ovsyanikov disappeared below deck that August day in 2019, after his face-to-face encounter with the polar bear, he passed the two crew members and was visibly moved.
“It was just like in the old days,” he said, referring to his time studying the bears on Wrangel Island.
Polar bears continue to be a powerful symbol of the Earth’s biodiversity, and the threat to it. In January 2026, a meeting was held between all the countries that manage polar bears. The big question was what the work of the coming years should look like.
WWF attended the meeting and said they will continue to support polar bear conservation through research, indigenous knowledge, Inuit-led conservation projects, and by advocating for the protection of polar bear habitats.
This isn't anything new. I attended the CITES CoPs in 2010 and 2013. In 2013, shockingly, Greenpeace decided to support the WWF against the Polar Bear Proposal, and even the Greenpeace EU director resigned in frustration. BTW, Greenpeace had nothing to do with the 2009 EU seal ban. The ban proposal originated with Carl Schlyter and other EU Parliamentarians; it was accepted thanks to them and several small Canadian and EU NGO activists. No, the aboriginal seal hunt was not affected, as the commercial seal hunt in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, is unrelated. Even the indigenous people mainly hunt ringed seals, so there’s no link between their subsistence harvest to survive and the commercial seal hunt in the East, where descendants of Irish and Scottish settlers kill young seals exclusively for their pelts, while the aboriginal communities harvest and use everything, including giving bones to their dogs. WWF has, for decades, used polar bears as an icon for their Christmas fundraiser and for international trade; they are behind the trade.