Global Outlook for Ice & Snow

Drying fish in a Greenland community. Photo: Stine Rybråten/CICERO

Local policy issues in the Arctic

key issues (such as the social impacts of commercial ship- ping). Actual responses are likely to reflect differences in the political and legal systems of the individual Arctic states. In the US, the State of Alaska will be a source of support for individual communities facing the impacts of changes in ice and snow. In Greenland, the government of Denmark is a likely source. Other affected communi- ties, for example in the Russian North, may not receive sufficient support from outside of their regions. While the impacts considered in the preceding paragraph are generally negative, changes in ice and snow may also have positive consequences at the local level. Oil and gas development can become a source of jobs; there is some prospect that changes in sea ice will permit the devel- opment of commercial fisheries in areas located farther north than existing fisheries, and conditions for agricul- ture may improve under a moderate warming. Jobs in the energy industry are often transient, and the sustain- ability of commercial fisheries in the Arctic may be low. So long as expectations are moderate and communities are careful to avoid undue dependence on these sectors, however, changes in ice and snow can become a source of benefits as well as threats to human well-being.

The impacts of changes in ice and snow are already major concerns in small communities scattered throughout the circumpolar North. Among the most significant of these are damage to infrastructure (such as buildings, munici- pal water and sewage system, roads, pipelines and air- fields) arising from coastal storm surges and the deepen- ing of the active layer of the permafrost; threats to safety (such as disintegration of sea ice used by hunters as a staging area) caused by unfamiliar weather conditions; health and nutritional concerns (related to availability of country food) associated with changes in the abundance and migratory patterns of subsistence resources, and a variety of social effects arising from the growth of com- mercial shipping and oil and gas development. The sig- nificance of these effects will vary from one community to another, and responses will differ – sometimes dra- matically – from one part of the Arctic to another. What is clear is that most individual communities lack the capac- ity to cope effectively with these stresses, either because they do not have the resource base needed to reconstruct physical infrastructure or to relocate or because they do not have the authority to make binding decisions about

CHAPTER 9

POLICY AND PERSPECTIVES

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