By Sébastien Duyck On April 22, leaders representing 175 governments convened in New York to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Never in the history of the United Nations had an international treaty secured so many signatures on a single day. The unprecedented number of national climate commitments submitted prior to the Paris conference further

By June Grønseth I’m very happy to have been born and raised in my current home of Lofoten, Norway, where I am able to capture the beauty each day brings in my photographs. Unfortunately, though, the story that I tell in my work does not have a happy ending. As humans, we have hard work

By Ingrid A. Medby Another year of Arctic conferences has begun, and first up was Arctic Frontiers in Tromsø, Norway.  With an ever-dropping oil price and the U.N. Climate Conference (COP21) fresh in mind, the most surprising thing to emerge from the week was the rhetoric of “business as usual” in the Arctic. However, while

By Chantal Bilodeau While world leaders convened at the United Nations 2015 Paris Climate Conference in November and December 2015, artists across the world mobilized to present cultural events in support of a global agreement reducing carbon emissions. One such event was the international Climate Change Theatre Action, a joint venture between NoPassport, The Arctic

By Edward Struzik When seabird biologist David Irons recently discovered the carcasses of some 8,000 murres on the shores of Prince William Sound in Alaska, the initial response was one of bewilderment. Murre die-offs have occurred in the past, but no one had seen anything quite as massive as this one. In various media reports,

By Laurel Jarombek Ice Watch, an installation art project by artist Olafur Eliasson and professor of geology Minik Thorleif Rosing, opened in Paris at Place du Panthéon on Dec. 3. As World Policy Journal previewed last month, Ice Watch comprises twelve pieces of glacier ice from off the coast of Nuuk, Greenland, weighing 80 metric

By Laurel Jarombek The 2015 Paris Climate Conference, also known as COP21, is rapidly approaching. The 21st annual assembly to be held from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 will bring together representatives of member countries of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which came into effect in 1994. The main goal of this

By Kevin McGwin Greenpeace is known for a lot of things. Many of them good. But among those who spend their time thinking about the Arctic, it is perhaps most closely associated with the disastrous impacts its efforts to stop Canada’s commercial seal harvest had on the Inuit and their ability to make a living

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 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