Polar bears and CITES: A rejoinder to Parsons and Cornick

Douglas A. Clark, Chanda Meek, John Cheechoo, Susan Clark, A. Lee Foote, David Lee and Geoff York

Marine Policy, 2013, vol. 38, issue C, 365-368

Abstract: In 2010 a US proposal to uplist polar bears to Appendix I of CITES was rejected. Parsons and Cornick (2011, [1]) critiqued this decision and the IUCN/TRAFFIC analysis that supported it. Their critique overlooks several important dimensions of polar bear conservation. Foremost, they failed to explore what subsistence hunting actually means in this context. Paradoxically, prohibiting international trade through CITES might actually increase the number of bears killed by northern Aboriginal peoples. Second, they misread the scope of the IUCN/TRAFFIC recommendation. Third, uplisting polar bears under CITES would allow national governments to claim they are saving polar bears through a decision that only addresses peripheral threats and diverts attention from insufficient action to mitigate climate change: the factor that Parsons and Cornick rightly point out as the primary threat to polar bears.

Keywords: CITES; Climate change; Endangered species; Polar bear; Subsistence; Ursus maritimus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X12001534
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:marpol:v:38:y:2013:i:c:p:365-368

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2012.06.014

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

More articles in Marine Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().