Pole To Pole

A Singaporean environmental activist travels to the Arctic and Antarctica to document the impact of climate change, and realises its consequences may hit closer to home than most might imagine.

- Karen Tee

When Jessica Cheam travelled to the Arctic Circle in June this year, she encountered the hottest summer there since records began, with temperatures peaking at 21 deg C – well above the average of 5 deg C. Staying in one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, Svalbard, Norway, Cheam recalls that she couldn’t sleep because the cabins in the research town were made to trap heat – and it was way too hot.

“It was very uncomfortable, ” says the founder of sustainability platform Eco-Business. One night, a polar bear walked through town at 3 am. You wouldn’t guess it but the two incidents were actually linked.

These days, these Arctic mammals enter human settlements more frequently as their natural habitat, the sea ice of the North Pole, continues to disappear due to global warming.

“Without the extent of ice, they’re wandering larger distances looking for food,” says Cheam.

“They’ve started eating bird’s eggs, which is not a part of their diet. This is causing the bears to have diarrhea while decimating the local bird population.”

So that she, too, did not become food for polar bears, Cheam was accompanied by scientists toting rifles whenever she wandered out of the safe boundary of town.

CHANGING PLANET