Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Amid increasing tensions between the West and Russia, a new Russian law regulating the navigation of foreign warships in the Northern Sea Route, whose legal regime has been the subject of a long-standing U.S.-Russian dispute, has garnered much international concern and criticism. However, a sober analysis suggests that many observers’ interpretations of the new law and its implications for Arctic security are overblown.

This article analyzes potential courses of action that Russia and the United States could pursue, jointly or separately, to protect the Bering Strait Region from the adverse effects of growing shipping.

The rapid pace of Arctic thaw demands collaboration with Russia, no matter the political implications. In a seminar hosted by the Arctic Initiative on May 11, 2022, Andrey Todorov and Andreas Østhagen tackled the thorny question of how to proceed with Arctic Ocean governance in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and expressed tentative hope for a pragmatic approach to cooperating with Russia on pressing issues such as shipping and fishery management.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

Arctic Data Stories will give students with non-technical backgrounds the chance to explore geospatial data and policy, guided by experts from the Arctic Initiative, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Esri. The workshop covers topics in data visualization, policy, and ArcGIS software and culminates with student presentations on Arctic-specific policy challenges. Sessions will be held on Fridays from 12–2 p.m. from February 11 to March 11, 2022, on Zoom. We will host a final workshop at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, MA on March 26 and 27. Participants must commit to attending all sessions when applying. Students wishing to participate should fill out the form HERE.

Arctic residents, students, policymakers, academics, and business leaders convened in Reykjavík, Iceland, for the 2021 Arctic Circle Assembly from Thursday, October 14 to Saturday, October 17. The Arctic Initiative organized two sessions at this year’s Assembly: 1) Arctic Innovation Lab: 10 Ideas for a Better Arctic, and 2) Policy and Action on Plastic in the Arctic: Innovations to Tackle Plastic Pollution with The Wilson Center’s Polar Institute. 

This paper will review the changing world of climate change education and opportunities for adopting innovative pedagogical approaches such as immersive technologies, participatory methods, and art-based learning.

This paper aims to articulate the absence of Indigenous people in Arctic climate change news coverage and to enumerate approaches for generating resonant, representative, and ethical stories in the white hot center of climate change.

John Holdren writes: For the last couple of decades, though, climate change has been transforming practically everything about the Arctic that matters to people both inside and outside of the region. That’s because the Arctic as a whole has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. The accumulating effects of this extreme warming are now manifesting themselves in a multiplicity of ways...And of greatest importance for rest of the world, the rapid pace of climate change in the Arctic is influencing the pace and impacts of climate change elsewhere.

There is an urgent need to incorporate the latest science on carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and northern wildfires into international consideration of how much more aggressively societal emissions must be reduced to address the global climate crisis.