ARCTIC: A new pact & more – 16th July 2024

Goddag daginn from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Arctic Update from the 16th of July twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what’s going down North of the Arctic Circle!

Who will dominate the Arctic is one of the biggest political questions of our time. The Chinese and Russian alliance has been the most powerful Arctic force in the last few years, but that alliance has a new competitor. On Thursday the 11th, at a NATO summit, a joint statement was released by the governments of the USA, Canada and Finland to announce the arrangement of a new political deal named the Ice Pact. This deal will see the three Arctic countries building a huge new fleet of icebreaker vessels, up to ninety, in the next few years. If the pact is successful, this alliance will operate the largest Arctic fleet on Earth and change the entire political ecosystem of the Far North.

At the same NATO summit on Wednesday the 10th, Bill Blair, the Canadian Defence Minister, announced that Canada will be building its own new fleet of twelve submarines to operate beneath Canada’s Arctic ice. Currently, the country only has a small cohort of four submarines purchased in the nineteen nineties, so this order will both modernize and vastly expand Canada’s Arctic military capabilities. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, spoke at the NATO summit, highlighting that new threats from Russia require Canada to militarize its Arctic more than ever before.

A failed attempt at a new pact has come between Russia and India this week. Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, visited Russia to negotiate the Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Agreement. But, as reported by The Eurasian Times, a news agency, on Wednesday the 10th, Modi has returned to India and has been unable to sign the deal. This deal would have seen a huge shift in Arctic marine traffic, as it would have allowed India’s navy to have completely unrestricted access to Russia’s Arctic waters. The deal reportedly collapsed due to India’s recent shift from buying military arms from Russia to buying arms from the US. With India still wishing to maintain good relations with both the US and Russia, Russia will not allow the Indian navy to move in its Arctic.

In other maritime news, every country with a shipping industry is studying the Arctic, and its rapidly melting ocean with the hope new shortcuts will appear. Contrary to this belief, in new research published on Thursday the 11th by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the melting sea ice might actually make sailing through the Arctic more difficult than when the ice was stable. In the past, although there was more ice, it was quite predictable. Now though, thick sea ice that was once frozen away from any ships is floating south into busy shipping lanes. This is making the Arctic a more unpredictable and hazardous place to sail and shows that, when the environment changes, we can never truly know what is going to happen. Wanna know more? Check out the Ocean Update with the link in the show notes.

The inland freshwater of the Arctic is very important too. Mining in the Arctic often leaves rivers polluted and damaged, but in Alaska, help is on the way. On Tuesday the 9th, the US Bureau of Land Management announced a new program intended to clean up polluted rivers much faster than previously. When completing a river recovery project in the past, each project started from scratch and could take over a year. But under the new plan, materials from previous projects can be reused to reduce the expected timeframe from a year down to just four months. With the Bureau’s goals including the restoration of salmon habitats across Alaska and Canada, the improvement in efficiency should help salmon in the Arctic soon.

Another system about to dramatically change is Canada’s child welfare system. On Thursday the 11th, the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s Indigenous political body, announced they have secured a deal with the federal government worth almost $50 billion US dollars to completely reform the child welfare system for Indigenous families. Until now, if a child in an Indigenous community was in need of a new home, the government would place them in a non-native household far from their home. Indigenous groups have protested against this for decades, saying it causes much more harm than good. But this massive funding boost promises to let native communities develop a welfare system that protects their children while keeping them in touch with their native culture.

Funding for native communities in Canada is crucial for ensuring a good quality of life for all Canadians. However, there has been a rise in people falsely claiming Indigenous origins to receive government benefits. To address this, the University of Saskatchewan announced on Friday the 12th the development of an anti-fraud system to certify the native roots of university applicants. The university spent two years securing collaborations with every Indigenous group in Canada, allowing claims of Indigenous origins to be verified by the respective community through an online portal. This system aims to ensure Indigenous scholarships benefit their intended recipients.

Indigenous rights need securing in Europe too. In Finland, the Sami Parliament recently held new elections after the Finnish government declared the twenty twenty-three elections void due to the removal of about sixty-five people from the voting register by the Sami Parliament. The Sami argued these people were removed due to not being of Sami heritage. On Wednesday the 10th, Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, the president of the Sámi Assembly of Finland, attended a UN summit on Indigenous rights and revealed that even with the non-Sami voters restored to the vote, the election favored Näkkäläjärvi again and the majority of voters support the adoption of a new Sami Rights bill in Finland to address the unequal society the Sami in Finland face.

The Finnish government has been making changes too. On Friday the 12th, the Finnish parliament passed a bill to address the issues at the Russian border. Last year, Russia funneled many migrants from Asia into Finland as retribution for Finland joining NATO. The new law allows the Finnish border authorities to immediately refuse entry to all asylum seekers, rather than process them within Finland. Petteri Orpo, the prime minister, says this will strengthen national security, while Li Andersson, the Left Alliance party leader, says this decision is a violation of human rights for asylum seekers.

Creating an equal society is an important issue in Greenland too. For two years the Danish government has promised to create a plan to combat the discrimination and racism that the Inuit, Greenland’s natives, face, both in Greenland and Denmark. But on Tuesday the 9th, Kaare Dybvad Bek, the Danish Minister for Immigration and Integration, announced the plan is being delayed. Greenland’s parliament derided the announcement, accusing Denmark of not prioritizing Greenland or its people. No new deadline has been set, so the Greenlandic people may continue to suffer while Denmark delays taking action.

What has come right on time though is a joyful milestone in Norway. On Thursday the 11th, the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research announced the first litter of Norwegian Arctic fox cubs of the year. Cubs had been leaving their dens over the week prior to the 11th and by that date, a total of twenty-nine cubs had been observed. This is the start of the season in which cubs leave their dens and can be counted, so hopefully many more baby foxes are due to arrive in Norway over the summer.

Finally, foxes aren’t the only animals making a comeback. A much older animal might be coming back to the Arctic: the wooly mammoth. On Thursday the 11th, scientists from the Center for Genome Architecture published a study in the journal Cell detailing how they have been able to produce a multidimensional version of the genome of a complex extinct species for the first time ever. This is now the most complete DNA sequence of an extinct mammal ever produced and the scientists behind this accomplishment think that by intertwining this DNA with existing elephant species, the wooly mammoth might be reborn.

If you are interested in the revival of the mammoth, the project Revive and Restore is a great source of information. Their link is in the show notes.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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