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23.09.10
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Arctic Thaw
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By Roland Oliphant
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told this week’s International Arctic Forum in Moscow that the center of Cold War confrontation at the top of the world now exemplifies international cooperation and peaceful partnership. Meanwhile, environmentalists are hoping that he will stand by his pledges to develop the Arctic region sustainably and carefully.
Three years ago, a Russian mini submarine piloted by polar explorer Artur Chilingarov placed a small Russian tricolor on the seabed beneath the polar ice at the North Pole. Though no one pretended that the stunt amounted to a legal claim on the Arctic Ocean floor, it reminded the world that Russia is pushing a claim in the region and it is serious about it.
This week Russia pulled another Arctic-related publicity stunt, but with a very different flavor. Chilingarov joined some hundred dignitaries, scientists and diplomats from around the world – including Prince Albert II of Monaco, an Arctic enthusiast whose personal friendship with Vladimir Putin is said to have brought it about – at a Moscow conference called the “Territory of Dialogue.” The buzzword was “cooperation,” and the universal message – perhaps a reflection of the softer, more conciliatory foreign policy Russia is said to have adopted in the last year – was that whatever conflicts might occur, they will be resolved “by international law and science.”
But however the competitors choose to frame it, everyone knows that the rush for the Arctic is well and truly
underway. The Arctic is warming faster than anyone imagined, said Jan-Gunnar Winther, the director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, and as the ice retreats, fish stocks, oil fields and shipping lanes are becoming accessible. “None of the climate models we have used in the past were able to predict the degree of warming we have seen in the past couple of years,” said Winther. “So we don’t know what is going to happen, but we do know the ice is going to melt faster than we predicted.” Some experts are now guessing that the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in summer by mid-century.
Thus politicians and diplomats are trying to hammer out their nation’s claims now, scientists are rushing to understand the changes taking place, and environmentalists are chasing them all, hoping to get strong safeguards in place before the oil rigs and the fishing fleets arrive. The conference at Moscow State University was an unprecedented attempt to bring them all together under one roof.
Science and law come into the picture under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows a nation to claim territorial waters based on the extension of its continental shelf. Chilingarov’s mission in 2007 was to gather evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that extends from Russia to the North Pole and all the way to Canada, is such an extension of Russia’s shelf (“still working,” he said when asked whether he had any more evidence, and promised more expeditions). The Canadians, it would be fair to say, have other ideas. But both sides will have to submit their claims and geological evidence to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, whose experts will then rule impartially on who is right. Or at least, that’s the idea.
There are five countries – Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway and Denmark – with Arctic coastlines, and all of them are gathering evidence about the extent of their continental shelves. So far only Norway has seen any of its claims approved, but most of the other nations, including Russia, are set to submit fresh applications in 2013 and 2014.
“We have to face various futuristic predictions about upcoming battles for the Arctic,” Putin told delegates. “But it’s clear that the majority of such frightening scenarios in the Arctic have no real foundation. They are created in order to play states in the region against each other and to create conflict between them, and then to be able to profit from the result. As the saying goes, some want to catch fish in murky waters,” the prime minister added. “These questions will be decided on the basis of science and international law.”
This sentiment was echoed almost exactly by Michael Byers, a professor of international law at the University of British Columbia who leads several projects on Canadian sovereignty. “This is not going to be determined by power or politics,” he said. “This is the result of some very forward-looking diplomacy 30 years ago, when Canadian, American and Soviet diplomats foresaw there was a possibility of disputes in the future, and decided to create a science-based process to help solve those problems when they emerged,” he said.
“There are good examples of cooperation,” agreed Paul Berkman, who leads the Arctic Geo Politics program at the University of Cambridge. “The agreement between Norway and Russia that was signed this year regarding the Barents Sea, which has been disputed for 40 years, is a good example of cooperation on the law of the sea. But there has been some complacency in the Arctic in terms of preventing conflict,” he added. “Avoiding hard discussions is a risk.”
For now, though, the words are warm and the intentions are apparently positive – and not just on the diplomatic front. For the diplomats, there are no fixed deadlines on resolving the issue. Even if there is enough gas there to fuel the world for 20 years, it will be difficult to get out. But the environmental situation is moving at breakneck pace. The more ice melts, the more energy from the sun is absorbed by darker water – the resultant acceleration in warming is already being seen, said Winther, who spends most of his time in the Arctic archipelago of Svarlbard and has seen it first hand. “We used to have winter ice well beyond southern Svarlbard, and winter ice would still touch the north of the peninsula. This year we had open water all around the archipelago. You could sail around it.”
The direct impact is huge. High energy-content plankton, which forms the base of the Arctic food chain, has been replaced by lower energy species from the Atlantic. As a result Arctic cod stocks are suffering, sea birds are having to fly further to find food and are reproducing more slowly, and seals have migrated north.
The icon of the Arctic (and Putin’s United Russia Party), the polar bear, is having a particularly tough time. With an estimated 25,000 individuals in the whole Arctic, the bear was entered the red list for threatened species on May 2009. Some projections estimate that two thirds of the population could be lost by 2050 if sea ice continues to retreat.
The impact in the ecosystem is going to have a big impact on commercial interests. Arctic cod, a valuable fish that currently is fished by both Russia and Norway, are likely to move further north and east – benefiting the Russians perhaps, but impacting Norwegian fisheries. “Industries have evolved over hundreds of years, but when spawning grounds move further north fishing fleets will have to adapt. And this isn’t theory any more. It’s going on,” said Winther.
There are other interests. One development Canada and Russia are excited about is the opening up of northern sea routes between the Atlantic and the Pacific. This summer a Norwegian ship carrying ore was the first non-Russian vessel to make it through the passage – which cuts the route through the Suez Canal by some 4,000 miles. The achievement was held up as another example of cooperation, because the Norwegians could only get insurance when the Russians agreed to provide ice breakers and a potential rescue service.
But environmentalists are not all that thrilled. The northern routes are dangerously shallow, and the impact of spillage would be “disastrous,” said David Gordon, the director of Pacific Environment, an NGO that has been working in Russia for 20 years. “To deal with an oil spill you need lots of ships, lots of people, and lots of boom,” he said. “But there’s none of that in the Arctic except in isolated spots, like Murmansk. It’s dark for six months of the year, and there is no way to clean up oil if it gets under the ice. A tanker spill in the Arctic would be a nightmare.”
Putin’s verbal commitment to environmental standards was welcomed, if not completely bought at face value. Nor was the LUKoil delegate’s insistence that his company’s latest project had proved itself hurricane proof and “was so environmentally friendly that the seals watched us build it, and they’re still watching us work.” (“We often hear from the industry a simplistic view of how safe they can make things,” was Gordon’s diplomatic take on that).
But as Victoria Elias of the World Wildlife Fund Russia put it, the fact that the Russian government has put a policy commitment on the table to develop the Arctic sustainably was good news itself. “Governments don’t have a great track record on keeping to environmental standards,” said Gordon. “But if the only thing that comes out of this conference is that Putin’s promise to ‘quite literally clean up’ the military debris left in the Russian Arctic is carried through, it would be a huge achievement.” |
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