Protecting the Environment of the Final Frontiers

For many, the polar regions still represent the last places where human influence has not had an impact. These are the last frontiers where you can find wilderness not cursed by human touch. For those who know these regions, and have visited them, however, this characterization is far from the reality. Even if these are still relatively clean environments, anthropogenic pollution, whether in the form of persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, or, most importantly, climate change, reaches both polar regions. Most of the environmental governance problems that we face in various regions of this planet are also confronted in the Arctic, whether these be environmental, economic, or even, allegedly, military. For those who still struggle with whether we have entered the Anthropocene, the lesson from the polar regions is clear: both ends of the Earth can nowadays be seen as dumps of environmental pollution.

There are many biophysical similarities between the Arctic and the Antarctic. These are regions that are exposed to harsh climatic conditions, receiving less radiation from the sun than other parts of the globe. Their ecosystems are simple, having had to adapt to cold and dark environments with short and bright growing seasons. These regions are also fairly inaccessible, given their extreme conditions, although this inaccessibility is decreasing as the climate changes. Both of these areas are crucial for the functioning of our climate system: as coolers of the climate, as amplifiers of its impacts, or simply as places whose possible melting could cause the sea level rise that puts coastal cities around the world at risk. For these reasons, many also claim that the protection of these regions is immensely important for protecting our common environment.

Two of the books reviewed here address both polar regions, while Stone’s The Changing Arctic Environment focuses only on the Arctic. Each of these books is excellent in its own genre, and they complement each other. They are part of the efforts to, explicitly and implicitly, discuss how these regions could be better environmentally protected. The authors come from different disciplinary backgrounds, with different perceptions on the contributions that the polar regions and their governance systems can make to the protection of our shared environment.

It might seem that, because of the similarities shared by the polar regions, governance lessons from one could be applied seamlessly to the other. Stone’s volume on the Arctic most clearly presents the idea that the way the Arctic’s environmental problems have been tackled should inform global environmental governance more broadly. Stone uses the term “Arctic Messenger” to describe, in part, how the Arctic Council has been able to influence global environmental protection, and as well as to describe what the role of the Arctic should be in our global efforts at tackling pollution problems more generally. There are already good examples of Arctic Council actors influencing the adoption of global environmental conventions, such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Mercury Convention (Koivurova et al. 2015).

However, extreme caution should be exercised when trying to borrow policy lessons from one polar regime to the other, even if both the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty System deal extensively with environmental protection. Both Diplomacy on Ice and The Polar Regions: An Environmental History should have emphasized the differences between the two polar regions from the governance viewpoint.

Eight sovereign states govern most of the Arctic, with their own systems of law and governance operating in different parts of the region. Diplomacy on Ice shows brilliantly how a complex governance system has emerged for the Arctic, simply because it is governed by all of the international obligations these eight states have committed themselves to, together with various other layers of governance in the region. Only the Arctic has human societies occupying it. The Antarctic...