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.

The Arctic, long described as the world’s last frontier, is quickly becoming our first frontier—the front line in a world of more diffuse power, sharper geopolitical competition, and deepening interdependencies between people and nature. A space of often-bitter cold, the Arctic is the fastest-warming place on earth. It is humanity’s canary in the coal mine—an early warning sign of the world’s climate crisis. The Arctic “regime” has pioneered many innovative means of governance among often-contentious state and non-state actors. Instead of being the “last white dot on the map,” the Arctic is where the contours of our rapidly evolving world may first be glimpsed. In this book, scholars and practitioners—from Anchorage to Moscow, from Nuuk to Hong Kong—explore the huge political, legal, social, economic, geostrategic and environmental challenges confronting the Arctic regime, and what this means for the future of world order.

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.”

Significant diminishment of the Arctic ice cap is propelling the advent of a new, blue water ocean and, with it, new commercial and economic opportunities. Abundant natural and mineral resources, as well as rich fishing stocks, encourage Arctic and non-Arctic nations to explore these resources through the enhanced use of Arctic maritime transportation routes, which connect geographically distant economies more directly. As a result, the evolving commercial dynamics of Arctic international shipping—both destinational and transshipment—are beginning to change. Once considered dangerous and noncommercial, Arctic shipping routes such as the Northern Sea Route are increasingly scrutinized as potential economical alternatives to some of the world’s most popular maritime passages.

Lessons from the Arctic: The Role of Regional Government in International Affairs is a collection of articles written by twenty-six leading and emerging scholars from across the circumpolar region. Each author assesses and explores the processes of regional governance in the Arctic from an interdisciplinary perspective. The topics include Indigenous internationalism, paradiplomacy, federalism, global institution-building, and more.

This book contains assessment of the progress, or the lack of it, in implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through review of the assessments and of case studies, readers can draw lessons from the actions that could work to positively address the goals. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is designed to catalyze action in critical areas of importance to humanity and the planet. The effort to implement the SDGs, however, demands a sense of urgency in the face of environmental degradation, climate change, emerging conflicts, and growing inequality, among a number of other socio-economic problems. Five years after the launch of the 2030 Agenda, this book takes stock of how far the world has come and how we can position ourselves to achieve the global targets. The book is one of the first to assess how the implementation is impeded by the onset of COVID-19. It contains a special chapter on COVID-19 and the SDGs, while many thematic chapters on different SDGs also assess how COVID-19 adversely affects implementation, and what measures could be taken to minimize the adverse effects. This publication thus provides a fresh look at implementation of the SDGs highlighting impactful and creative actions that go beyond the business-as-usual development efforts. The volume reinforces this analysis with expert recommendations on how to support implementation efforts and achieve the SDGs through international and national strategies and the involvement of both the public and private sectors. The result is an indispensable textual tool for policy makers, academia, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the public, as we march toward the 2030 deadline.

In this timely book, leading scholar Oran Young reflects on the future of the global order. Developing new lenses through which to consider needs for governance arising on a global scale, Young investigates the grand challenges of the 21st century requiring the most urgent and sustained planetary responses: protecting the Earth’s climate system; controlling the eruption of pandemics; suppressing disruptive uses of cyberspace; and guiding the biotechnology revolution.

This book offers a broad and holistic overview of issues in the Arctic today, a region which is transforming due to changing world order and climate agenda. While new economic opportunities - and with China, as well as other geopolitical players in the region - are emerging, new security challenges are arising as well. In this comprehensive scholarly resource, contributors from around the world and from a broad variety of disciplines share their thoughts on the future of the Arctic, in a manuscript that will be of interest to researchers, economists, and policymakers.

Climate change in the Arctic Ocean has stirred a remarkable surge of interest and concern. Study after study has revealed the astonishing speed of physical, chemical, ecological, and economic change throughout the expanse of the Arctic. What is more, the consequences of the changing Arctic are not restricted to the Arctic itself, but affect everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, ranging as they do from extreme weather to resource availability and food security, with implications for politics, economics, and sociology. The challenge is to comprehend the full extent and variety of these consequences, and meeting this challenge will demand a multi- and transdisciplinary understanding. Only by this means can we hope to map out a knowledge-based ecosystem and move toward knowledge-based resource management—the essential precondition for any sustainable future. In this book, leading international experts, from many felds of science and across the entire pan-Arctic region, give their specifc takes on where the Arctic Ocean is heading. All have taken care in their writing not to exclude non-experts, in the conviction that multi- and transdisciplinarity can only be achieved when communication and outreach are not tribal in nature. The recurrent guiding theme throughout these pages is “Whith -er the Arctic Ocean?” Taken in concert, the essays synthesize the current state of scientifc knowledge to project how climate change may impact on the Arctic Ocean and the continents around it. How can and how should we prepare for the imminent future that is already lapping at the threshold of the commons? What readers will hopefully take from this multi- and transdisciplinary endeavor is not the individual perspective of each contribution, but the picture that emerges across the entire suite of essays. As we move into a near future that will encompass both the probable and surprises, this book attempts to conjure the multi-dimensional space in which a sustainable future must be brought into being.

Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.