European Institute

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Category: Winter/Spring 2009

Created on 02 December 2008

As the Arctic melt-down opens new access for transport and for production of oil and gas fields in these waters, the Nordic nations of Europe have been galvanized into looking for ways to forge joint arrangements for civilian protection against disasters in these freshly-accessible zones – possibly with links to their defense establishments. A new high-level report, Nordic Cooperation on Foreign and Security Policy – commissioned by the Nordic Council and written by Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former foreign minister of Norway – lays out the changing stakes that are emerging in the Arctic as the ice cap shrinks, and then goes on to emphasize the need for littoral nations to pool resources to meet the associated new security challenges there – both for surveillance and for crisis-response. “The Nordic countries are responsible for the management of large sea areas. Climate change and melting of the sea ice will open the way for considerable activity in these areas, including new shipping routes through Arctic waters to the Pacific Ocean. This means that Nordic cooperation in the northern seas and the Arctic is highly relevant,” the report concludes.

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Category: Roundtables

Created on 04 December 2007

H.E. Wegger Chr. Strommen, Ambassador of Norway to the U.S.; Rafe Pomerance, President of the Climate Policy Center; George Newton, former Chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, and Amb. David Balton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and Fisheries, discussed key issues related to the Arctic, such as climate change, territorial claims, and energy. Mark Gaspar, Director of Coast Guard Systems for Lockheed Martin Washington Operations outlined the private sector’s technical developments that would allow the Arctic states and others to deal with these issues.

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Category: Winter/Spring 2008

Created on 02 December 2007

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.

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Category: Winter/Spring 2008

Created on 02 December 2007

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.

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