Exploit or empower: pros and cons of researching interventions in the Arctic

Several important climate system tipping points are associated with the thawing Arctic including ice sheet collapse, AMOC shutdown, sea ice loss and permafrost thaw which may be imminent. This prompts examination of interventions to support the vulnerable systems and has raised great debate on potential governance of research into any future deployments. As well as their global impacts these systems also impact the lives of the Arctic Peoples and local ecosystems. The Arctic contains an estimated 25% of global untapped gas reserves and 13% of oil and large amounts of rare earths such as 40% of global palladium. Much of this is beneath hazardous seas, or as with Greenland, largely beneath thick permanent ice. But the Arctic is rapidly losing its ice cover, exposing more land and ice-free ocean, making it an attractive target for resource extraction and a geopolitical pawn.

Unfortunately, resource extraction provides limited sustainable benefits, for the locals, with most profits to the big mining companies. However, ice itself is a global resource that, if valued proportionately to the damage its loss causes via flooding and building coastal protection, as well as ice-albedo and carbon-temperature feedbacks would be worth tens of trillions of dollars per meter over the century. Even avoiding raising sea levels by 1 inch would be worth far more than the yearly $500 m Danish “block grant” to Greenland. This would allow Arctic Peoples more self-determination, while disproportionately benefiting the Global South which has limited adaptive capacity compared with the Developed World. The ethical alternative is to value the frozen Arctic as a global good, perhaps with an analogous system to the REDD+ mechanism applied to conserving the Amazon.