WWF urges global deal on protecting Arctic Ocean

RANDY BOSWELL
CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

A World Wildlife Fund report detailing “serious gaps” in global governance of the Arctic Ocean calls for a new international accord to regulate commercial development in the rapidly transforming region.

The WWF study identified “loopholes” in maritime law, pollution regulation, shipping rules, fishing zones and other spheres of activity “that could allow irreparable damage to the marine environment, its biodiversity and indigenous peoples.”

The report claims there are “no clear responsibilities and mechanisms keeping marine resource extraction within sustainable limits, or for preventing and responding to pollution accidents and shipping disasters.”

The WWF’s proposed Arctic Ocean Framework Convention, to be administered largely by the eight-nation Arctic Council, would challenge the more exclusive “Arctic 5” grouping of coastal states, championed by Canada, that has recently asserted the special rights and responsibilities of states directly bordering the Arctic Ocean.

Last month, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon hosted a controversial gathering of his counterparts from the four other Arctic coastal countries — the United States (Alaska), Russia, Norway and Denmark (Greenland) — as a follow-up to the inaugural 2008 Arctic Summit in Greenland that explicitly rejected the need for a new international treaty to govern polar affairs.

The WWF report acknowledges that the Arctic coastal states deserve special status in charting the region’s future and that the international Antarctic Treaty — which prohibits commercial development on the southern polar continent — doesn’t translate well to a northern ocean surrounded by states with resource rights and legitimate territorial and maritime authority.

But the report, researched and authored by international legal experts from Finland and the Netherlands, concludes that the environmental stakes are so high in the Arctic — “one of the most unique and pristine areas of the world” — that a binding multilateral convention, administered through the Arctic Council by the largest possible number of stakeholders, is crucial.

“The top of the planet is too fragile for a patchwork approach to governance,” said Craig Stewart, director of WWF-Canada’s Arctic program.