Building Common Interests In The Arctic Ocean With Global Inclusion

This book contains an inclusive compilation of perspectives about the Arctic Ocean with contributions that extend from Indigenous residents and early career scientists to Foreign Ministers, involving perspectives across the spectrum of subnational-national-international jurisdictions. The Arctic Ocean is being transformed with global climate warming into a seasonally ice-free sea, creating challenges as well as opportunities that operate short-to-long term, underscoring the necessity to make informed decisions across a continuum of urgencies from security to sustainability time scales. The Arctic Ocean offers a case study with lessons that are especially profound at this moment when humankind is exposed to a pandemic, awakening a common interest in survival across our globally-interconnected civilization unlike any period since the Second World War. This second volume in the Informed Decisionmaking for Sustainability series reveals that building global inclusion involves common interests to address changes effectively “for the benefit of all on Earth across generations.”

This book proposes environmental security as providing a framework to mitigate the risks of the Arctic's shift from an ice cap to a seasonally ice-free and, so far, ungoverned space.

Governing Arctic Seas introduces the concept of ecopolitical regions, using in-depth analyses of the Bering Strait and Barents Sea Regions to demonstrate how integrating the natural sciences, social sciences and Indigenous knowledge can reveal patterns, trends and processes as the basis for informed decisionmaking. This book draws on international, interdisciplinary and inclusive (holistic) perspectives to analyze governance mechanisms, built infrastructure and their coupling to achieve sustainability in biophysical regions subject to shared authority. Governing Arctic Seas is the first volume in a series of books on Informed Decisionmaking for Sustainability that apply, train and refine science diplomacy to address transboundary issues at scales ranging from local to global. For nations and peoples as well as those dealing with global concerns, this holistic process operates across a ‘continuum of urgencies’ from security time scales (mitigating risks of political, economic and cultural instabilities that are immediate) to sustainability time scales (balancing economic prosperity, environmental protection and societal well-being across generations). Informed decisionmaking is the apex goal, starting with questions that generate data as stages of research, integrating decisionmaking institutions to employ evidence to reveal options (without advocacy) that contribute to informed decisions. The first volumes in the series focus on the Arctic, revealing legal, economic, environmental and societal lessons with accelerating knowledge co-production to achieve progress with sustainability in this globally-relevant region that is undergoing an environmental state change in the sea and on land. Across all volumes, there is triangulation to integrate research, education and leadership as well as science, technology and innovation to elaborate the theory, methods and skills of informed decisionmaking to build common interests for the benefit of all on Earth.

International science, technology, innovation, and knowledge production (STIK) partnerships offer opportunities for Canada to accelerate collective solutions, meet national priorities, and build consensus within a complex and changing geopolitical context. Currently, Canada lacks a cohesive national strategy for assessing STIK partnerships. The need for a strategic and deliberate approach to international STIK partnerships is acute. Opportunities for such partnerships are rapidly expanding, and Canada risks falling behind in an increasingly competitive global knowledge economy. Meanwhile, new scientific discoveries and emerging innovations are increasing in complexity; global challenges highlight the urgency of international cooperation and collaboration; and national interests are affecting the movement toward open science and transdisciplinary approaches. In Navigating Collaborative Futures, the expert panel presents an approach for making decisions about international STIK partnerships. An evidence-based, data-enabled framework can help organizations articulate partnership goals; identify, evaluate, and weight appropriate indicators of partnership value; and determine whether to pursue or continue a partnership.

This seminal book results from a NATO Advanced Research Workshop at the University of Cambridge with Russian co-directorship, enabling the first formal dialogue between NATO and Russia about security issues in the Arctic Ocean. Involving interdisciplinary participation with experts from 17 nations, including all of the Arctic states, this workshop itself reflects progress in Arctic cooperation and collaboration. Interests now are awakening globally to take advantage of extensive energy, shipping, fishing and tourism opportunities in the Arctic Ocean as it is being transformed from a permanent sea-ice cap to a seasonally ice-free sea. This environmental state-change is introducing inherent risks of political, economic and cultural instabilities that are centralized among the Arctic states and indigenous peoples with repercussions globally. Responding with urgency, environmental security is presented as an "integrated approach for assessing and responding to the risks as well as the opportunities generated by an environmental state-change." In this book – diverse perspectives on environmental security in the Arctic Ocean are shared in chapters from high-level diplomats, parliamentarians and government officials of Arctic and non-Arctic states; leaders of Arctic indigenous peoples organizations; international law advisors from Arctic states as well as the United Nations; directors of inter-governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations; managers of multi-national corporations; political scientists, historians and economists; along with Earth system scientists and oceanographers. Building on the “common arctic issues” of “sustainable development and environmental protection” established by the Arctic Council – environmental security offers an holistic approach to assess opportunities and risks as well as develop infrastructure responses with law of the sea as the key “international legal framework” to “promote the peaceful uses” of the Arctic Ocean. With vision for future generations, environmental security is a path to balance national interests and common interests in the Arctic Ocean for the lasting benefit of all.

This open access book focuses on climate change, Indigenous reindeer husbandry, and the underlying concept of connecting the traditional knowledge of Indigenous reindeer herders in the Arctic with the latest research findings of the world’s leading academics. The Arctic and sub-Arctic environment, climate, and biodiversity are changing in ways unprecedented in the long histories of the north, challenging traditional ways of life, well-being, and food security with legitimate concerns for the future of traditional Indigenous livelihoods. The book provides a clear and thorough overview of the potential problems caused by a warming climate on reindeer husbandry and how reindeer herders’ knowledge should be brought to action. In particular, the predicted impacts of global warming on winter climate and the resilience of the reindeer herding communities are thoroughly discussed.

The Earth Sciences industry faces a new challenge - the need for accurate, efficient, and reliable methods to monitor and predict geological phenomena and environmental changes. As climate change, earthquakes, and other natural disasters become more frequent and severe, the necessity for advanced tools and techniques is paramount. Traditional methods often fall short in providing the precision and speed required to address these critical issues. Geologists and earth scientists who are grappling with the urgent problem of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize their field, will find the solution within the pages of Novel AI Applications for Advancing Earth Sciences. This book offers the research community concepts expanding upon the fusion of AI technology with earth sciences. By leveraging advanced AI tools, such as convolutional neural networks, support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and the potential of remote sensing satellites, this book transforms the identification of geological features, geological mapping, soil classification, and gas detection. Scientists can now predict earthquakes and assess the probability of climate change with unprecedented accuracy. Additionally, the book explains how the optimization of algorithms for specific tasks substantially reduces the time complexity of earth observations, leading to an unprecedented leap in accuracy and efficiency.

Conversations defining the Arctic region often provoke debate and controversy -- for scientists, this lies in the imprecise and imaginary line known as the Arctic Circle; for countries like Canada, Russia, the United States, and Denmark, such discussions are based in competition for land and resources; for indigenous communities, those discussions are also rooted in issues of rights. These shifting lines are only made murkier by the threat of global climate change. In the Arctic Ocean, the consequences of Earth's warming trend are most immediately observable in the multi-year and perennial ice that has begun to melt, which threatens ice-dependent microorganisms and, eventually, will disrupt all of Arctic life and raise sea levels globally. In The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall offer concise answers to the myriad questions that arise when looking at the circumpolar North. They focus on its peoples, politics, environment, resource development, and conservation to provide critical information about how changes there can, and will, affect our entire globe and all of its inhabitants. Dodds and Nuttall explore how the Arctic's importance has grown over time, the region's role during the Cold War, indigenous communities and their history, and the past and future of the Arctic's governance, among other crucial topics.