Polar Bears Worth $6.3 Billion

Each polar bear is worth about as much as a typical house in Toronto, according to Environment Canada.

A study commissioned by the federal government has determined that Canada's 15,000 polar bears are worth an estimated $6.3 billion, or about $400,000 a bear. The study was undertaken to determine the worth of some of Canada's most iconic animals, and how much Canadians would be willing to pay to preserve at-risk species. As it turns out, a Canadian family would fork over slightly more than $500 to keep the magnificent arctic beasts from going extinct. The St. Lawrence beluga whale wasn't so lucky, as the Environment Canada study found Canadians would only pitch in $107 to get them bumped up to "threatened" status. The $400,000-per-polar-bear cost was arrived at by calculating how much money polar bears bring in from tourism, hunting, and intangibles such as value they bring to Canadian and indigenous cultures. Canada has about two-thirds of the world's polar-bear population, although earlier this year the federal government put the bear on its list of at-risk animals for the first time.