Signals From the Arctic: Security Concerns Beyond Historic Experience - Part 2

Photo by: Christopher Michel

Responses to diminishing Arctic sea ice have so far focused mainly on building capacity to meet increasing marine activities. Impacts of rapid warming of the region do not only relate to the Arctic Ocean and coastal waters, however, and capacity aimed at marine activities will not seriously address the challenges facing people, in the region and globally, when they have to deal with the impacts of climate change. Examples include impacts on food security and health, where new concerns are coming to the fore. Unfortunately, political discussions often separate issues into different silos. The environment gets its own category without attention to how environmental change interlinks with societal changes. The security community usually stays comfortably within its conventional discourse without much attention to the potential impact of and interlinkages with environmental change, with only a few exceptions. The consequences of a thawing Arctic and their links to global processes illustrate the need to develop analyses of how environmental, social, and political changes interact in ways that are likely to have profound consequences for all aspects of security, way beyond issues related to resources and national border.

For example, a recent outbreak of anthrax in Siberia has been linked to a sick animal buried long ago surfacing and exposing both animals and people to this deadly disease. Furthermore, a recent study shows that a Cold War U.S. airbase built beneath the Greenland ice sheet in 1959 and abandoned in 1967 might resurface as the ice sheet recedes, uncovering the site’s hazardous waste.[1] While many studies have pointed to the consequences of a warming Arctic change, new surprises keep coming up. This is in addition to already reported impacts such as risks related to travel on the land, where search and rescue operation are increasing because of more unpredictable weather conditions.[2]

It is also well known that a thawing Arctic has global consequences. Melting permafrost can cause the release of large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, further fueling the warming of the planet. In addition, the declining ice and snow cover speeds up global warming because of the so-called albedo effect where dark surfaces free of snow and ice absorb more of the sun’s energy than a white landscape. Moreover, melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet and from numerous smaller glaciers contribute to sea-level rise around the world, where coastal areas will feel the impact. In Florida, some counties have already started to develop strategies for dealing with the flooding, land subsidence, and saltwater intrusion that comes with sea-level rise. A majority of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, and in many places it will difficult to protect low-lying land and infrastructure.

Ensuring security in relation to Arctic change therefore requires an approach that focuses on capacity building in its broadest sense, and with efforts that go far beyond national and military security concerns. Ensuring security becomes a matter of safeguarding the capacity to handle change and surprises, in the Arctic and beyond. It is about ensuring that people have the education opportunities, the social networks, the cultural context, the breadth of knowledge, access to healthy ecosystems, the institutions, the infrastructure, and the finances to be able to assess the challenges at hand and the options available when new concerns surface. These are the resources that we need to muster and in many places enhance to safeguard security. It would make sense to give them as much attention as we do to the tracking of sea-ice extent, military presence, and hydrocarbon reserves in the region. However, to map and monitor the bundle of resources that are needed to safeguard society’s capacity to adapt to change, journalists, researchers, and policy analysts need to move out of their silos and comfort zones with the aim of building a more integrated understanding of what security might mean in a world of rapid climate change.

A year ago, in an address at the GLACIER conference in Alaska, President Barack Obama highlighted how Arctic climate changes and its far-reaching impacts should send a message to the world because “climate change is a trend that affects all trends — economic trends, security trends.  Everything will be impacted.” One by one the indicator lamps are starting to blink: the Arctic sea-ice extent, the global temperature record, as well an increasing number of extreme weather events in many parts of the world. However, media and politics have their own logic where attention quickly shifts to the latest crises. The risk is that we are starting to get so used to these reports that they no longer gather the same attention as the 2007 Arctic sea-ice minimum. However, understanding the implications of and responding to the signals of a changing climate is likely to be one of the major security challenges of this century.

This is the conclusion of a two part blog series. Click here for part one.