The Arctic Council at 20

Two decades ago the Arctic was considered a remote part of the world, locked in perpetual winter. It was a place that occasionally fired the southern imagination but which was seen to have little connection to life elsewhere on the planet.

Reality was different, of course. During the Cold War the Arctic was a major theatre for military activity and the place over which intercontinental ballistic missiles would have flown on their way to metropolitan targets in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Things began to change in 1987 when former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called for the Arctic to be a “zone of peace.” Following Gorbachev’s speech, the Arctic Cold War began to thaw rapidly through meetings of scientists from both sides of the ideological divide. This early cooperation focussed on first identifying, and then dealing with, sources of pollution and radiation in Arctic waters. From this cooperation emerged the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy which included eight Arctic nations and several Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations, called Permanent Participants.

This cooperation was ground breaking and led to the formation of the Arctic Council in 1996. The council is unique for a couple of reasons. It was the first multilateral political body to include the participation of Indigenous Peoples, for whom the region has been a homeland for thousands of years. Despite the challenges it faces in a changing Arctic, the council is a model for multilateral cooperation in an era increasingly defined by division and discord.

Created at a time when climate change was not on the international agenda, some have argued that the council, which is a political arrangement not a treaty-based body, does not have the clout to deal with the rapid changes now happening in the Arctic. While the council has done good work on gathering information about environmental issues and producing high quality assessments (its 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was the first such regional assessment) it has been criticized for being ineffective in delivering on policy and enacting change. Critics argue it is unable to keep pace with the increasing interest in the Arctic by the growing number of countries seeking to join its ranks as observers along with China, Japan, India, Singapore, and others.

However, there is another perspective.

“The Arctic Council is not based on laws and agreements but it has built a foundation on shared norms and values,” Heather Exner-Pirot of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada has written. “This has proven a boon to the organization.” She argues that the consensus based approach means Arctic politics is not a “zero sum game” but seeks compromise. This is a “victory for soft law.”

Nevertheless, there is another discourse these days that looks at the Arctic as a potential zone of conflict in the future that may play out between the great powers over the coming years. Some of this debate is over who owns the continental shelf under the multi-year sea ice that has covered parts of the Arctic Ocean since the last ice age but which is now rapidly disappearing and raising global interest in opportunities to exploit the region’s resources. However, it’s not the Wild West. Access to the shelf is being determined through a long process under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Rapidly melting sea ice is not just regional geopolitical issue – it has consequences for the entire planet. Change is happening so quickly that the Arctic is moving from being the world’s cooling system to a driver of climate change. “These changes represent a spiritual impoverishment of the earth, as well as a practical catastrophe for humanity,” writes Peter Wadhams, an emeritus professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University. “The time for action has long since passed.”

When it gathers for its biannual meeting this week in Portland, Maine, the members of the Arctic Council will take a moment to acknowledge the organization’s many important scientific contributions over the last 20 years. They will then turn their attention to a full agenda, which includes climate change.

As they do, Prof. Wadham’s words are a stark reminder of how much, and how quickly, the Arctic has changed since 1996. How to deal with new Arctic realities, such as the potential of open Arctic waters in the next few years, will challenge the council and test its relevance in the coming years.