The Poster Child of Climate Change? The Changing Iconography of the Arctic Polar Bear

Informed by scholarship on climate change and polar bears, this paper analyses alternatives to images of polar bears stranded on ice floes. The empirical frame of reference is recent prize‐winning images and photo essays in popular media, drawn from a selection of news reports on targeted websites. The aim is not to produce a comprehensive data set of polar bear images, but to ask what messages about climate change impacts these images can help to convey. The first part shows that whilst Arctic polar bears remain associated with cuteness, endangerment and vulnerability to global warming, there are also reports of survival and local adaptation to climate change. I call this section ‘Echoes of Knut’, in memory of a zoo bear that survived via global resettlement. The second part is also about polar bears out of place but tells a different story about the impacts (for them and for humans) of a changing climate. Media coverage of increasingly close (and unwelcome) encounters between bears and humans in urban spaces shows how polar bears can represent strategies of spatial containment, as well as survival and local adaptation to change, in a time of climate crisis and emergency. Images of polar bears can thus do more than symbolise global warming. They can help to show how spatial relations are changing in consequence of climate change.