A few years ago, if you shot and killed a polar bear for any reason in Arctic Canada, even in self defense, you automatically paid a $10,000 fine to the Fish & Game warden in the nearest settlement, as the bear is counted against that community's annual kill quota. The fine amount is based on the value of a polar bear to big game hunting tourists who pay about that amount to one of a community's hunters who won a license via an annual lottery.
In the early 2000s, when I was still doing glacial geological field work on northern Baffin Island, polar bears were showing up on the land earlier and earlier in the spring/summer, as the sea ice cover from which the bears hunt seal has continued to diminish from anthropogenic global warming. In three short field seasons between 2001 and 2003, I had more polar bear encounters than I had experienced in my previous 18 months of field work over three decades.
Polar bears on Baffin Island are no longer scared off by flares, crackers (loud noise makers fired from shot guns), or shooting near their feet. Setting up a perimeter fence with noise-making trip signals might give you a few seconds of warning that a bear has entered your camp, but that is about it. The safest way to conduct arctic field work these days, for bears and humans, is via helicopter in day trips from lodging in settlements, which is obviously very expensive.
A lot of my colleagues continue to do glacial geological field work on Baffin, in Greenland, and on Svalbard (from the UNIS field station in Longyearbyen), but polar bears are a huge deal for them now. I am really glad that I never needed to shoot a polar bear in self defense as a friend had to do, as he said that it changed his life forever.
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