TAI Bookshelf Podcast - The Icelandic Coast Guard with Sóley Kaldal

Icelandic coast guard vessel in Reykjavik harbour. Photo: Tony Hisgett

The Arctic Institute’s Bookshelf Podcast is back with its second series! This season, your favorite hosts Liubov Timonina and Romain Chuffart are joined by a new host, Saga Helgason. Together they chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. Tune in every other week and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.

For the last episode of Season 2, Saga went on a solo adventure and recorded a live episode (!) with Sóley Kaldal, a risk analysis specialist and safety engineer at the Icelandic Coast Guard. Saga and Sóley discussed the peculiarities and challenges when working with the Coast Guard, international Search and Rescue (SAR) cooperation in the Arctic, as well as finding best ways to address climate change, increased maritime activity, response times or surveillance issues. Sóley told us how her research background laid out the path to the Icelandic Coast Guard and what she enjoys most about her work there.

Sóley Kaldal works as an expert lead for Arctic safety and security cooperation at the Icelandic Coast Guard. She is also an adviser to Iceland’s National Security Council. Soley is a Fulbright scholar and Yale ’20 alumni with a Master of Advanced Study (M.A.S.) from the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs. She graduated from Lund University in Sweden in 2011 with a master‘s degree in Risk Management and Safety Engineering. For her bachelor‘s, she completed a double degree in physics and philosophy.

References and further readings:

• Andreas Østhagen, Coast Guards and Ocean Politics in the Arctic (Palgrave Macmillan 2020)
• TAI Bookshelf Podcast, Coast Guards Politics in the Arctic with Andreas Østhagen (S1E1)

This episode was recorded in May 2021.