By Laura Strickler Mitigating climate change is a daunting task, especially in the Arctic where surface temperature is rising at more than twice the rate of that in lower latitudes. Climate change in the Arctic also has global impacts. As the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea levels rise in Florida, and permafrost thaw has serious

By Heather Exner-Pirot When Shell announced last month they would cancel their Chukchi Sea operations “for the foreseeable future,” many southern environmentalists were jubilant. As Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven said, “Big oil has sustained an unmitigated defeat. They had a budget of billions, we had a movement of millions. For three years we

This article was previously published by Barents Observer. By Maura Forrest and Lily Haines A new crop of students is about to graduate from the Sámi Education Institute’s Inari Sámi language class. Inari Sámi is one of Finland’s most threatened languages, with just a few hundred native speakers remaining. But these language classes promise to turn students into fluent Sámi language speakers in just eight

The World Policy Institute, in partnership with Ecologic Institute’s Arctic Summer College, is proud to highlight the excellent work of 2015 Arctic Summer College Fellow Ekaterina Klimenko while promoting further valuable exchange in the Arctic region. By Ekaterina Klimenko Although over the last decade there has been concern regarding the possible emergence of territorial conflicts or

By Erica Dingman In a very broad sense the Arctic is predictably unpredictable. Temperatures in Anchorage, Alaska rose to a high of 86 F in June 2015 on a day with a historical average of 65 F. And the highly cited U.S. Geological Survey oil and gas report states that the Arctic region accounts for

The World Policy Institute, in partnership with Ecologic Institute’s Arctic Summer College, is proud to highlight the excellent work of 2015 Arctic Summer College Fellow Martin Kossa while promoting further valuable exchange in the Arctic region. By Martin Kossa Given South Korea’s geographical location outside of the Arctic region and its harsh security environment, it is

By Lou Del Bello Tikigaq is one of the longest continuously inhabited communities on the North American continent. Its people are so ancient that their local language has a word for the woolly mammoth, which shared their small peninsula in northwestern Alaska before it went extinct over 11,000 years ago. In the not-so-distant future, some

By Laurel Jarombek President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Alaska may be historic in that he is the first sitting president to make a trip to the Arctic Circle, but whether his words and actions there will change the course of history is far less certain. His visit coincided with the Conference on Global Leadership

By Uiloq Mulvad Jessen Greenland is the world’s biggest island with its 2,166,086 square kilometers, which is about the same size as Alaska and California together. In Greenland, there are approximately 56,500 inhabitants, compared to California and Alaska with about 39.5 million. The people in Greenland are spread throughout 17 towns and 58 settlements. The

This article was previously published in the ICC Alaska June Newsletter.  By Jim Stotts In mid-May the U.N. agency that regulates the world’s oceans adopted rules aimed at preventing pollution from ships sailing in Arctic and Antarctic waters. The London-based International Maritime Organization (IMO) approved the so-called ‘Polar Code’ that comes into effect in January