Wildlife group praises Arctic Council’s new direction

The fragile Arctic environment should be a top priority for the Arctic Council, as the U.S. assumes its chairmanship, says WWF Canada. (FILE PHOTO)

The World Wildlife Fund Canada calls the United States focus on climate change as incoming chair to the Arctic Council “encouraging,” the organization said in an April 24 release.

Foreign ministers and Indigenous leaders from all eight Arctic states — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden — met in Iqaluit April 24 and 25.

That’s where outgoing Canadian Arctic Council chair Leona Aglukkaq handed the chairmanship to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

And as the U.S. takes on leadership of the council over the next two years, the WWF said it has high hopes for a renewed agenda, one that will include concrete actions on climate change and protection of the Arctic environment.

The American agenda, released last October, highlights goals like the development of renewable energies, public education, monitoring ocean acidification and the creation of new protected marine areas.

“The United States’ focus on creating new protected areas, like the proposed National Marine Conservation Area in Lancaster Sound, is very encouraging for us,” Paul Crowley, the WWF’s Arctic program director, said in the release.

“Putting nature first, both for Arctic wildlife and for the people who depend on it, should always be at the forefront of the Arctic Council’s activities.”

Also included in the U.S. Arctic Council theme “One Arctic: Shared Opportunities, Challenges and Responsibilities” is a call for better information sharing on the environmental impacts of hazardous substances and increased co-operation in the oil spill preparedness and response.

Oil spills can have disastrous consequences for the marine wildlife and coastal communities of the Arctic.

“Co-operation in this area, or a lack thereof as was shown recently when a barge carrying diesel fuel went adrift in Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, may make all the difference as climate change opens up the Arctic to more economic development opportunities,” Crowley said.

In her farewell speech as outgoing chair of the Arctic Council, Leona Aglukkaq did not name environmental issues at the top of her list of accomplishments, although she did credit Canada’s leadership “short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon (soot) and methane.”

But in an April 24 news release, environmental group Greenpeace went as far to slam the outgoing Canadian chairmanship of the Arctic Council, saying it produced “poor outcomes that saw corporate interest acquire a stronger voice in the pan-Arctic forum, and environmental protection fall low in the priority list.”

A separate report commissioned by Greenpeace suggests that, looking forward, Arctic Council members focus on what it calls the real culprits threatening the north’s fragile ecosystems, namely the “development, emissions, governance decisions and human activities in non-Arctic regions of the planet that have been primarily responsible for the dramatic loss of sea ice, transboundary pollutants, ocean acidification and other important stressors on Arctic ecosystems that are currently being witnessed and reported on by the Arctic Council.”