Arctic sovereignty and security in a climate-changing world

Seeing no need to develop a new legal regime for the governance of the Arctic, the five states committed to ―take steps in accordance with international law both nationally and in cooperation among the five states and other interested parties to ensure the protection and preservation of the fragile marine environment of the Arctic Ocean‖ (Ilulissat Declaration, 2008). [...] However, Canada should be working much more effectively to mobilize its soft power: to become a leader in developing better environmental management of the Arctic, to involve the indigenous peoples in the Arctic in the negotiations on their future and to ensure that cooperation and international law guides the resolution of the territorial disputes in the Arctic region. [...] The EU will play a key role in the Arctic‘s future, in terms of the commercial, shipping and scientific research interests of its member states.3 China is already active in the North; in late August 2008, it dispatched its third Arctic expedition to the region to collect data and samples on the impacts of climate change on the North Pole. [...] Progress, however, has been very slow beyond this, and important areas like Lancaster Sound and Hudson Bay do not 5 Twelve of the world‘s 64 large marine ecosystems are found in the Arctic: the West Greenland Shelf, the East Greenland Shelf, the Barents Sea, the Norwegian Shelf, the West Bering Sea, the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Laptev Sea, the Kara Sea, Hudson Bay [...] Go Beyond Ilulissat In 1959 a number of governments came together to sign the Antarctic Treaty, a document in which the signatories agreed to use the Antarctic exclusively for peaceful purposes; to promote international scientific cooperation in the region; and to create a firm foundation for the continuation and development of such cooperation (Kraft Sloan and Hik, 2008).