This review is part of Dmitriy’s coverage of the Climate Film Festival in New York.
Directed by Abraham Joffe.
Entertainment: 4, Impact: 5
2025 festival award-winner for CLIMATE FILM FESTIVAL VISIONARY AWARD | AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD
If you ask most people to name an animal that is in critical danger from climate change, polar bears would probably be near the top of the list.
YouTube is brimming with videos about the threat to polar bears from reputable organizations like the BBC, Smithsonian and the World Wildlife Fund, which for several years has run a fundraising campaign encouraging concerned nature lovers to symbolically “Adopt a Polar Bear.”
It’s easy to empathize with videos of bedraggled polar bears lumbering over increasingly small chunks of ice. A 2007 US study found that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be gone by 2050, putting the species on the path to extinction before the end of the century as their natural habitat melts from under them.
While most of us may view this as a call to action to protect the remaining 22,000 to 31,000 polar bears, others see a lucrative business opportunity.
This is the central conflict in Trade Secret, a powerful new documentary from director Abraham Joffe and executive producer Adam McKay (who wrote and directed Don’t Look Up) that captures polar bears in a startling new light. Instead of images of desperate-looking polar bears, viewers are treated to footage of hundreds of polar bear furs stocked up on shelves in secret storage rooms that would make a taxidermist blush.
How could the poster animal for wildlife conservation be treated as a commodity?
That’s the question that drives the three protagonists in Trade Secret – journalist Adam Cruise, conservation advocate Iris Ho, and wildlife photographer Ole J Liodden – who together make an all-star investigative team determined to get to the bottom of how and why a market still exists for polar bear furs.
The trio go undercover to capture never-before-seen footage of stacks of furs, challenge policymakers about why they’re not doing more to protect polar bears, and confront one of the world’s biggest conservation organizations for enabling it all to happen. As viewers, we share in their shock, disappointment and frustration as the story unfolds, making Trade Secret the kind of documentary that can get your blood boiling and your heart pacing.
Land of luxury, and trophy-hunting
The global fur trade has been a thorn in the side of nature activists for decades. It’s one thing for an Indigenous community to use an animal’s fur to keep warm in the winter – it’s quite another for someone to buy fur just to show off their wealth.
Given how few polar bears are left, their fur can command a premium on the open market. Polar bear skins are sold as a luxury item in China, fetching prices of as much as $60,000 depending on the size, quality, and whether the buyer wants to go through the proper channels.
The fact that this is (mostly) legal may surprise some viewers, but the real secret is the dirty politics behind governmental coalitions and the Convention of the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the global organization that regulates the trade in endangered plants and animals. Trade Secret takes us inside these official meetings as Cruise and his colleagues attempt to figure out why polar bears are kept on Appendix 2 of the CITES list of at-risk species rather than the Appendix 1 list of the most endangered species, for which international trade is essentially prohibited.
An unlikely culprit soon emerges – WWF, which since its founding in 1961 has raised billions of dollars from businesses and individuals who care about protecting nature and threatened species. What many may not know about WWF is that they are “not opposed to hunting programmes that present no threat to the survival of threatened species” – specifically trophy hunting where people get to kill exotic animals for sport (see: Cecil the Lion). This helps explain why WWF has lobbied against the uplisting of polar bears to Appendix 1 at both the 2010 and 2013 CITES meetings in opposition to both the United States and Russia, which proposed a ban on the international trade of polar bear skins. In an unusual geopolitical twist, the country trying to keep up the trade is Canada, which has two-thirds of the current polar bear population.
This seems to be something of a pattern for WWF, which has a documented history of lobbying countries to vote against the uplisting of certain vulnerable animals, often by pointing to shaky data on population trends to show that some hunting would not destabilize the species. For instance, at the 2022 CITES event in Panama, WWF supported Namibia in the downlisting of white rhinos, a species that many scientists agree is still in danger despite some recent signs of population growth.
Frustrated by the lack of accountability and transparency on the part of WWF, Trade Secret shows Cruise hand-delivering a report on his findings to The Guardian’s offices in the UK, leading to a whirlwind of negative press and more unanswered questions.
Fit for purpose?
In its official response to the report, WWF said: “Hunting is a complex issue, often linked to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and as such we don’t oppose it in all cases. This is not the same as supporting, lobbying, facilitating or promoting the trade in polar bear furs. We oppose all unsustainable hunting and illegal hunting, including in the Arctic. By far the biggest threats to polar bears are habitat loss and climate change, and we continue to work on conservation and campaigning on these vital issues.”
There are some choice words here, like “unsustainable hunting and illegal hunting,” that baffle the mind. If WWF acknowledges threats like “habitat loss and climate change,” why not also come out against trophy hunting, which is essentially the only reason there’s a market for polar bear furs in the first place? Since when did sustaining a species for hunting enthusiasts become more important than protecting a species from climate change?
It’s this kind of double standard and blatant hypocrisy that makes people distrustful of NGOs and skeptical of conservationist movements. WWF’s stance here isn’t just a threat to polar bears – it undermines other genuine efforts to protect vulnerable species.
As one former WWF executive puts it in his interview with filmmakers, “maybe you’re not fit for purpose anymore.”
The release of Trade Secret will undoubtedly lead to a firestorm of publicity that will force WWF, its corporate partners, and the member countries of CITES to respond and hopefully take action. But the film also offers an ode to the importance of investigative journalism and holding the powerful to account, showing what’s possible when three individuals take matters into their own hands.
