Nunavut polar bear monitoring and management: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:59, 19 November 2024

The findings of the GN survey, conducted from 1997 to 2000, indicated that the MC sub-population had depleted to less than half of its previous population estimate. Recognizing that there was no community consensus on whether polar bear numbers were declining, and if so, whether this was due to over- harvesting, or migration for reasons like for example environmental disturbances or changes in ice, the NWMB proceeded incrementally (NMWB 2000). They first installed a quota of 12 for the MC PBMU in 2000, followed by a moratorium in 2001. They furthermore charged the Department of Sustainable Development to gather additional information during those two years, in order to develop an effective management plan for subsequent years (NMWB 2000). The only subsequent government-led research activity between the 1997-2000 survey and the next scheduled population survey in 2014 was however the publication of a telemetry study (Taylor et al., 2006) and a community consultation on the listing of polar bears as a species of special concern under the Species at Risk Act (SARA; CWS, 2009). Other projects related to polar bears conducted in Gjoa Haven during this period, were collaborations between Gjoa Haven’s HTA and VC de Groot et al. (2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015), and a collaboration between Gjoa Haven’s HTA and Darren Keith to document polar bear IQ (Keith, 2005). These projects were conducted in (collaboration with) a community that has been seeking recognition for their disagreement around polar bear research and quota distribution since 2000, with an expectation that researchers address this issue. Neither V.C. de Groot’s nor Keith’s (2005) HTA-invited projects, however, had the resources the scope, or mandate to impact polar bear quota.

This speaks to a tangible gap between community priorities and the infrastructure available to those communities to have their priorities sufficiently funded, permitted and researched. Despite significant resources spent on polar bear research by institutions outside the community, see for example Nunavut’s Wildlife Research Trust (NWMB, 2022a; ITK, 2018), the financial, human, social and administrative capacities of community organisations like HTAs are limited, and their role in setting the research agenda is reactive rather than proactive; they can grant or withhold community sanction of wildlife research, but have limited mechanisms to influence terms or conditions under which this research is executed (Gearheard and Shirley, 2009). While community organizations like HTAs provide insights via consulting, handle requests for community sanction of research funding and permitting, and assume important roles within the research itself, (government) researchers and managers have not made themselves sufficiently available for questions of concern to the community itself. Such dynamics have tangible consequences for ongoing and future (research) partnerships, including our own.

Detour to Science based conservation

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-One of the ways in which the meanings and properties of scientific data are dis/continuously produced within Nunavut polar bear science derives from its nested entanglements with multiple national and international agreements on wildlife science, conservation and trade. Examples of these agreements are the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora CITES. As explained before, this nested system continues to consist of multiple interests that are often understood as in competition with one another (Clark et al., 2008). Importantly they also all rely on the same sources of data. Scientific data that is collected locally is thus not only expected to inform territorial harvest management decisions, but also to inform international conservation policy (Clark et al., 2023), -species (red)listing assessments (Regehr et al., 2016) and to counter climate change denial narratives (Harvey et al., 2018).
+The findings of the GN survey, conducted from 1997 to 2000, indicated that the MC sub-population had depleted to less than half of its previous population estimate. Recognizing that there was no community consensus on whether polar bear numbers were declining, and if so, whether this was due to over- harvesting, or migration for reasons like for example environmental disturbances or changes in ice, the NWMB proceeded incrementally (NMWB 2000). They first installed a quota of 12 for the MC PBMU in 2000, followed by a moratorium in 2001. They furthermore charged the Department of Sustainable Development to gather additional information during those two years, in order to develop an effective management plan for subsequent years (NMWB 2000). The only subsequent government-led research activity between the 1997-2000 survey and the next scheduled population survey in 2014 was however the publication of a telemetry study (Taylor et al., 2006) and a community consultation on the listing of polar bears as a species of special concern under the Species at Risk Act (SARA; CWS, 2009). Other projects related to polar bears conducted in Gjoa Haven during this period, were collaborations between Gjoa Haven’s HTA and VC de Groot et al. (2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015), and a collaboration between Gjoa Haven’s HTA and Darren Keith to document polar bear IQ (Keith, 2005). These projects were conducted in (collaboration with) a community that has been seeking recognition for their disagreement around polar bear research and quota distribution since 2000, with an expectation that researchers address this issue. Neither V.C. de Groot’s nor Keith’s (2005) HTA-invited projects, however, had the resources the scope, or mandate to impact polar bear quota.
-The data that is required to inform such global policy making, is sparse; from the 19 identified global sub-populations of polar bears, 10 were data-deficient in 2021 (IUCN, 2021). The pressure to fill such data-gaps on polar bear populations is furthermore rising, considering that the sea ice polar bears are presumed to be dependent on for their survival is expected to rapidly disappear as a result of climate change (Stirling et al., 2012). Although such pressures for data are most strongly manifested at the international level by such conservation platforms, its material consequences play out locally. For example through the specific agential, data-driven decisions that are made by polar bear biologists and research funders under international pressure to fill these data-gaps on Nunavut sub-population abundance. The meaningful inclusion of Inuit knowledge within these processes continues to be one of the most pressing issues at stake within Inuit self-determination (see ITK, 2018).
+This speaks to a tangible gap between community priorities and the infrastructure available to those communities to have their priorities sufficiently funded, permitted and researched. Despite significant resources spent on polar bear research by institutions outside the community, see for example Nunavut’s Wildlife Research Trust (NWMB, 2022a; ITK, 2018), the financial, human, social and administrative capacities of community organisations like HTAs are limited, and their role in setting the research agenda is reactive rather than proactive; they can grant or withhold community sanction of wildlife research, but have limited mechanisms to influence terms or conditions under which this research is executed (Gearheard and Shirley, 2009). While community organizations like HTAs provide insights via consulting, handle requests for community sanction of research funding and permitting, and assume important roles within the research itself, (government) researchers and managers have not made themselves sufficiently available for questions of concern to the community itself. Such dynamics have tangible consequences for ongoing and future (research) partnerships, including our own.
-It is important to first reiterate here again what can be seen as ‘meaningful’ inclusion, through the paradigm of agential realism. To be meaningfully included within a phenomena like scientific knowledge, is to be an agential force that contributes to the determining cut that distinguishes between what is included and what is excluded from the properties and meanings of such a phenomena. In this case, to be meaningfully included, means to co-determine the meaning of ‘scientific knowledge’. Without meaningful recognition or consideration of different knowledge systems within the phenomena of ‘science’, for example, the properties of ‘science’ become intelligible only through the agential cuts of one philosophical paradigm. In scientific wildlife co-management and research this is usually the cut of post-positivist western natural sciences and its understanding of the world through representative data (Brook, 2005; Smylie, 2014).
-Scientist seeking to make IQ ‘’intelligible’’ within this performance of western natural sciences, either need to break it down into such representative data, or placed IQ completely outside of the phenomena of Science to become intelligible as ‘another phenomena’ like; values, beliefs, ethics or cultural identities. Neither of those cuts can be considered meaningfully co-constituted with Inuit ways of knowing and being. Making IQ intelligible only as a category that can exist outside of science, continues a form of erasure in which the west views itself “as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge” (Smith, 1999, p. 63). While the breaking down of IQ into a reductionist western version of TEK, constitutes an ‘insidious form of cultural assimilation’ in which IQ is appropriated under the guise of knowledge co-production and co-management (Stevenson, 2004 ; 2006).
 <span class="detour link" data-page-title="Science_based_conservation" data-section-id="0" data-encounter-type="detour">[[Science based conservation|Detour to Science based conservation]]</span>