ARCTIC: China Enters the Arctic & more – 8th Oct 2024

Góðan daginn from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Arctic Update from the 8th of October twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what’s going down North of the Arctic Circle!

Let's start this update in the sea. On Thursday the 3rd, Copernicus, the EU’s climate monitoring body, released its latest annual State of the Ocean report. Regarding the Arctic Ocean, the report concluded that twenty twenty-three saw the lowest sea ice levels ever recorded in the polar regions. Since the measurement of sea ice began in nineteen seventy-nine, the Arctic has lost about 2 million square kilometers or almost 800,000 square miles of sea ice. If that area represented a country, it would be the 11th biggest nation in the world. Sea ice is only melting faster.

To learn more about this, check out the Rorshok Ocean Update with the link in the show notes!

In other news, on Wednesday the 2nd, Russian state television news reported that a Chinese Coast Guard fleet entered the Arctic for the first time. China has been increasing its Arctic influences, mostly through Russia, and this event shows China’s ability to operate far from its coast and the highest level of cooperation with Moscow in the Arctic ever seen.

If you want to know more about this story, you can also check out the latest episode of the Rorshok Ocean Update with the link in the show notes!

Speaking of Russia, the ocean around the country has been home to a lot of illegal shipping activity recently. On Tuesday the 1st, High North News uncovered how Russia's Arctic LNG2 project is skirting heavy US sanctions. The investigation by High North News revealed a fleet of Chinese cargo ships is currently transporting a massive pre-made power plant to Arctic LNG2, essential for getting the gas project up to full speed. Wison Industries, the company that built the power plant, informed the US in July that it would cease all business with Russia in order to keep its US contracts. The discovery that Wison is secretly working with Russia may lead to retaliation from the US government.

More about Russia as it has big ambitions for developing the Arctic. According to the Kremlin’s new federal budget released on Monday the 30th of September, the Russian government has allocated almost $300 million US dollars to the socio-economic development of the Arctic Region over the next three years. But Russia’s real priorities are clear at the moment, with almost $150 billion US dollars allocated to national defense each year for the next three years.

On that note about funding, a monumental positive change was made in Canada this week. On Monday the 30th of September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the town of Inuvik, in the North Western Territories, to sign a child and family services funding agreement between the provincial government and the Inuvialuit. This agreement means that the Canadian government will provide almost $400 million US dollars over the next decade for the implementation of a new Inuvialuit-led family and child services law in Inuvik, taking family law out of the federal government’s hands and keeping Inuvialuit children within their cultural system.

The Inuvialuit are Canada’s first Inuit group to implement their own family law and on Monday, the federal government stated that the agreement sets a precedent for other Inuit groups to create their own family services legislation.

Next, progress in Sweden’s green energy sector is faltering. Last month, battery maker Northvolt scrapped plans for a major factory in northern Sweden, cutting 1,600 jobs. The project, expected to revolutionize the green energy transition, had attracted billions in funding from governments and businesses.

However, on Wednesday the 2nd, the Swedish Debt Office told Reuters it would withhold the billions raised unless Northvolt resumes the factory expansion. While Northvolt says it can’t afford to proceed, losing access to this funding could make halting the project even more costly.

Elsewhere in northern Sweden, a different green energy project has been advancing. Boliden Rönnskär is the country’s only smelter for base metals and is one of the world's largest recyclers of metal from electronic materials. This recycling process is a major producer of carbon emissions, so on Wednesday the 2nd, the Swedish Agency for Economic Growth announced it is providing over $8 million US dollars to Rönnskär to reduce its emissions. The funding will be used to replace the oil-fueled machinery with electric power generators, which is expected to save over 7,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.

Across the border to Norway where on Monday the 7th, the government published the new national budget for twenty twenty-five. The executive has increased the budget for the northern mainland regions by about six percent and Svalbard’s budget by almost nine percent. However, Northern Norway remains the least funded region in the country. There is money set aside for some specific projects like salmon recovery, new housing, and public service improvements, while reducing national income tax and increasing national security allowances.

But not everyone is happy in Norway. The Sami Parliament’s response to the national budget on Monday the 7th has been negative, with Sami Councilor Runar Myrnes Balto telling state news that his parliament was promised a budget increase of about 30 million US dollars but only received about 3 million dollars. This has amounted to a budget increase of less than one percent in a year, where inflation was almost four percent. So the Sami Parliament says its budget has significantly decreased while the rest of Norway sees tax cuts and budget rises. The Parliament says it will begin negotiations soon with the government to try and improve Sami livelihoods in twenty twenty-five.

The US government is providing important Arctic funding, too. On Tuesday the 1st, the Department of Commerce announced almost $2 million dollars for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) to develop and deploy new critical ice and ocean observations in the Arctic. Much of this funding will go to the Argo floating array — a floating set of scientific instruments that have collected valuable data worldwide but isn’t optimized for cold water operations. By updating the Argo array for Arctic conditions, NOAA hopes to fill some of the many knowledge gaps in the Arctic.

Since we mentioned the US, the country is celebrating the 10th annual Fat Bear Week from the 1st to the 8th of October. This week, webcams filmed the brown bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park, and the public voted for the title of fattest bear. The event’s beginning was delayed as viewers on Monday the 30th of September would have witnessed a fatal fight between two Alaskan grizzlies, who were fighting over food. Explore.org, the event organizer, explained on Tuesday the 1st that bears can be especially violent just before they hibernate so the voting was delayed by a day to wait for any further violence to dissipate.

To see the bears yourself, take a look at the link in the show notes.

Some rare good environmental news in the Arctic comes from the ozone layer. NASA published a study on Monday the 7th measuring the ozone layer above the Arctic, finding that twenty twenty-four has seen the healthiest Arctic ozone layer since nineteen seventy-nine.

The atmospheric ozone layer, which protects earth from spaceborne radiation, was devastated by gasses released by household items like air conditioners and spray cans during the 20th century before the nineteen eighty-seven Montreal Protocol banned such harmful substances.

Since then, ozone layer recovery has been very slow but twenty twenty-four saw a sudden jump in atmospheric ozone measured by NASA, with five percent less UV rays reaching Earth compared to last year.

And finally, The University of Copenhagen published a study on Monday the 30th of September that revealed the incredible trading network that Vikings operated from Greenland, which traded as far as the Middle East. During the Middle Ages, Vikings traveled from Scandinavia over 6,000 kilometers, almost 4,000 miles, to northern Greenland to hunt walruses for their ivory. This ivory was then sold within a trade network they’d established globally.

The study reveals also that vikings must have collaborated with Greenland’s Indigenous groups more than previously thought, and weren’t just the violent warriors of film and TV, but diplomats and traders too.

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

Do you know that besides the Rorshok Arcitc Update, we also do others? Our latest ones are the Multilateral Update, about the world’s major multilateral institutions, and the Ocean Update, about the 70% of the world covered in salt water. The other ones are all country updates, we have a selection of countries from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Check roroshok.com/updates for the full list, the link is in the show notes.

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