Navigating the New Arctic: Navigating Convergent Pressures on Arctic Development
Few transformations are as dramatic or as complex as those occurring now in the Arctic.
Alongside amplified climate change, changes in global markets, regional geopolitics, and community aspirations are motivating visions of new opportunities to develop natural resources and infrastructure in the region.
How might communities, governments, and industries navigate these disparate and converging pressures?
Models, data, and expertise
CPAD uses a multi-disciplinary analysis of economic potentials, infrastructure needs, climate change impacts, and evolving approaches to Arctic management and sovereignty.
15 investigators,
10 institutions
CPAD is a diverse group of academic and practitioners, economists and climate scientists, geographers and policy analysts. We are guided by an International Reference Group (IRG) of independent experts to advise and review our research findings.
Featured Research
Divergent trajectories of Arctic change: Implications for future socio-economic patterns
ABSTRACT: Climate change is causing rapid warming in the Arctic, which, alongside other physical, socio-economic, cultural, geopolitical, and technological factors, is driving change in the far north. This research presents a conceptual model summarizing Arctic change factors which in turn was used in the design of a Delphi exercise which leveraged a variety of experts to forecast trajectories in different parts of the Arctic. Based on these experts’ expectations for economic and governance outcomes by 2050, we find that our results illustrate the “many Arctics” concept or some of the ways in which the Arctic is heterogenous now, and perhaps becoming increasingly so in the future. Sub-regions of the Arctic differed in expert expectations about the future of resource extraction, tourism, Indigenous self-determination, and military activity, among other outcomes. This work also discusses the post-2022 geopolitical situation and some potential implications of “many Arctics” for policy and future governance.
Tingstad, A., K. Van Abel, M. M. Bennett, I. Winston, L. W. Brigham, S. R. Stephenson, M. Wilcox, S. Pezard (2024). Divergent trajectories of Arctic change: Implications for future socio-economic patterns. Ambio.
The Dark Arctic
ABSTRACT: The snow-white Arctic is darkening physically and economically. Climate change is turning frozen seas into open water and blackening snow and ice as soot spreads and algae propagates. At the same time, the region’s shadow economy is expanding. Illicit activities like human trafficking and fishing have long thrived in northern peripheries beyond state reach, while Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s institutionalized the black market. The invasion of Ukraine further tightened ties between Russian Arctic resource development and criminal underworlds. With the Kremlin continuing northern extraction to fund the war and circumpolar diplomacy fracturing, the entire region is at risk of environmental and geopolitical degradation.
Bennett, M. M. (2024). The Dark Arctic. Current History, 123(849), 20-26.
The CPAD team at our annual meeting in beautiful Portland, Maine (August 2024)
How will converging geophysical and socioeconomic pressures shape Arctic development between now and 2050?
We are a multi-disciplinary research consortium, aiming to answer this question though the convergence of natural and social sciences.
Acknowledgment
CPAD receives financial support from the National Science Foundation. The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of institutions to which the authors are affiliated.