Responsibility for the Arctic from Afar

Polar bear on Arctic sea ice. Photo: Stefan Hendricks

The following is the moderator’s summary from the Arctic Expert Workshop “How to Protect the Arctic from Afar” on the responsibility of Non-Arctic states for the Arctic, which took place at the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt – UBA) in Berlin on 24 October 2018.

The Expert Workshop “How to Protect the Arctic from Afar” reminded everyone that the Arctic is a large and diverse place, where things are nevertheless very much interconnected. That is true for regions, activities, and ecosystems in the Arctic. It is also true for the Arctic being connected, in manifold ways, to non-Arctic countries and regions, with their patterns of land use, production, and consumption. We find the Arctic to be strongly affected by emissions, resource extraction and use, industrial activities, policies and regulations, and conservation efforts in non-Arctic areas.

The people and states outside the Arctic, including Germany, may exercise certain rights in some parts of the Arctic, notably rights of access such as innocent and sometimes transit passage in Arctic waters, but, more importantly, they also have responsibilities. They have the responsibility not to harm the Arctic and its peoples, its environment and ecosystems.

The indigenous peoples of the Circumpolar North have lived in the region, adapted to it and shaped it by their presence for thousands of years. Their communities, ways of life, customs, and customary rights are older than any of the states that now dominate Arctic governance. It is these peoples, if anyone, that have original rights in the Arctic, but their understanding of rights is different to the dominant understanding of the “rights” concept found outside the Arctic. In the region, rights come with responsibilities and command respect for life, the environment, and ecosystems in ways that non-Arctic people find hard to fit with their numerically-focused value systems, including – and especially – most economists.

In our discussion at the workshop, we found it relatively easy to talk in general about pressures and drivers of environmental and social change in the Arctic, and more difficult to formulate concrete steps to act on the responsibility we have not to harm the Arctic and its people. However, during the workshop, three working groups deliberated a number of ideas that may be acted upon: one on shipping and the Polar Code, one on climate action and air pollution control, and one on tourism in the Arctic.

The workshop has thus shown that it is indeed possible to formulate solutions for the challenges of protection and sustainable development of the Arctic. But is there agreement, let alone consensus, on what should be done? Is delivery of the solutions possible given the international legal, economic, and political order, and given the governance structure we have in and for the Arctic? Is there the political will? Can it be generated? At the workshop, we covered only part of the complex process of developing ideas into effective action.

All workshop participants became aware, again, of the tension among indigenous peoples, Arctic states, and non-Arctic states, and the powerful and often well capitalised industries that operate in the Arctic across borders. Fishing and maybe aquaculture, shipping, and the extraction of oil, gas, and mineral resources come to mind. These industries are powerful and well-connected to determine the laws and regulations that govern their behaviour.

The workshop addressed the question of “How to Protect the Arctic from Afar”, from a non-Arctic country like Germany. In our discussion, we identified many pressures on the Arctic and the drivers behind them. We used examples of cause-effect relationships, and we heard various ideas of what can be done, should be done, perhaps even needs to be done.

This workshop, with participants from various professional, national, and personal backgrounds, was a good start; it showed that we can overcome segmentations and divisions. It is a sign of hope that we can think and do things differently, and that much more can be achieved.

We do not, or not yet, seem to grasp the big picture. Do we understand the complete footprint of Germany, specifically, on the Arctic? We are not sure we have identified all the activities, policies and laws that link Germany to the Arctic, and we do not have good metrics to attribute effects in the Arctic to causes in Germany. Even less do we understand the impact of policies and regulatory action, or inaction, in and by Germany on the Arctic, the Arctic environment, and Arctic peoples.

There is certainly room and perhaps a need for an Arctic footprint and policy assessment for Germany. Such an assessment should cover all relevant policy areas and be shared by all Federal Ministries. It should also be shared with other countries, to be complemented, critiqued, improved, and validated, especially with respect to attribution of causes to countries and policies.

But, most importantly, such an Arctic footprint and policy assessment should also be shared, from the beginning, with the indigenous peoples of the Circumpolar North. In the language and spirit of transdisciplinary research, they should be engaged closely in the identification of research questions, methods, and approaches in what is called co-design of research.

Indigenous knowledge and non-indigenous practitioners’ knowledge should then also be incorporated into the research process and knowledge generation, through a systematic and structured process of knowledge co-production.

And the research findings – interim and final – should be interpreted jointly by everyone involved, including not only indigenous peoples but also other intended beneficiaries of the research. This joint co-interpretation of research results and new knowledge should determine the key messages about what new findings mean, and what should be done, and why.

Even then, there remains another challenge we identified at the workshop: There are too many divisions among scientific disciplines, policy areas, countries, and language areas, and, I would add, the civilian and the security domains and actors in the Arctic. Those separations need to be overcome, not only so that we can better understand the intended and unintended consequences of actions and proposals but develop a shared, holistic understanding of the complex region that is the Arctic.

R. Andreas Kraemer is Mercator Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, Director of the Oceano Azul Foundation, and Initiator the Arctic Summer College; he teaches environmental policy and European integration in the Berlin Program of Duke University.