evidence: London, 27 February: 2023 marked 50 years of international cooperation to protect polar bears across the Arctic. Those efforts have been a conservation success story: from a population estimated at about 12,000 bears in the late 1960s, numbers have almost tripled, to just over 32,000 in 2023. [...] Crockford added, "Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort are the only polar bear subpopulations which appeared to show strong support for the premise that sea ice declines blamed on human-caused global warming have reduced bear abundance. Now we know previous claims are almost certainly incorrect." There were no reports from the Arctic in 2023 indicating polar bears were being harmed due to lack of summer sea ice habitat, in part because Arctic sea ice in summer has not declined since 2007.