Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industryNovember 2013
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| Vol. 18, No. 45 | Week of November 10, 2013 |
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Obama appoints polar bear commissioner
President Obama has appointed Geoffrey Haskett as the U.S. commissioner for the U.S.-Russia Polar Bear Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Nov. 1. Haskett is the regional director for the Alaska region of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Fish and Wildlife said the polar bear commission was established in 2000 under a bilateral agreement between the United States and Russia for the conservation and management of the Alaska-Chukotka polar bear population. Chukotka, the most easterly region of Russia, faces Alaska, on the western side of the Bering Strait. The polar bear population targeted by the agreement lives in the Chukchi and Bering seas.
Commitment to conserve The bilateral agreement for polar bear management commits both the United States and Russia to conserve the bears and to safeguard the cultural and traditional use of polar bears by Native peoples on both sides of the international border, Fish and Wildlife said. Haskett has represented the United States on the polar bear commission since the commission’s inaugural meeting in 2009. Since then the commission has taken actions such as establishing sustainable subsistence harvest levels and developing a joint U.S.-Russian polar bear research and monitoring plan, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.
In 2008 Fish and Wildlife listed the polar bear as threatened under the terms of the Endangered Species Act. The agency sees the bear as under threat because of the projected melting of the animal’s sea-ice habitat under the impacts of global warming.
—Alan Bailey
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Copyright Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA)©1999-2019 All rights reserved. The content of this article and website may not be copied, replaced, distributed, published, displayed or transferred in any form or by any means except with the prior written permission of Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA). Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law.
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