European Institute

As once-frozen areas above the Arctic Circle change with the global climate, reports almost daily in the media note unique features about the impact in the far north. For one thing, the changes in the Arctic – both at sea and on land – are larger than those in the temperate areas. The scale of these changes is documented in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) completed in 2004 under the sponsorship of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee. Second, these changes in the Arctic, particularly in the Arctic Ocean, are opening an international frontier that all will seek to exploit for the advantages it will offer: increased accessibility to the area will mean both shorter intercontinental transportation routes (and trips to local destinations) and also easier access to natural resources. The changes will be radical: Ships will ply ocean routes that have been defined with only marginal accuracy; land will be developed that only a decade or two ago was considered largely uninhabitable and unusable. And this move north, over land and sea, will bring more inhabitants, many (in fact, most) of whom will be experiencing for the first time a unique place, one that is poorly understood by both the migrating individuals and the rest of the world, and an environment that is potentially dangerous and unforgiving.

The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the earth as a whole. Since 1979, Arctic warming has reduced summer sea ice by more than 40 percent, and many climate models now predict that all sea ice will disappear by 2030 or sooner. To put this in perspective, the amount of sea ice lost from 1980 to 2007 would cover half of the European Union.