Three thousand miles and seemingly light years away from any issue that might interest the Caribbean, a territorial confrontation of sorts is underway to control uninhabited parts of the Arctic.
For months now Russia, the United States, Canada and Denmark have been involved in a low intensity but rapidly unfolding struggle that seeks to determine who owns the land beneath an ocean that for centuries has remained frozen.
The issue first came to public attention when a Russian Parliamentary De-puty planted a Russian flag using an undersea submersible some four kilometres beneath the ice cap at the North Pole. He did so with the endorsement of President Putin in a very public demonstration of Russia’s claim to the region.
Canada responded announcing that it would open a deep water naval base to parallel its arctic military training facility on the northern tip of Baffin Island. It also said that it would step up its Arctic naval patrols and would henceforth have a “growing, real and long-term presence” in the region.
This in turn prompted Denmark to announce that it would invest in developing evidence that made clear its claim on the Arctic through sending scientific expeditions to survey the undersea mountain ridge that is attached to its territory of Greenland.
The US has also said that it intends to assert its sovereignty. Speaking recently in Norway, Claudia McMurray, the US Assistant Secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, noted that the loss of ice and the opening of previously inaccessible areas provided new opportunities for energy exploration in the region. A US coast guard icebreaker, she said, had recently returned from mapping an area further north than ever before, unimpeded by pack ice. For the US, she said this raised new issues about access to the region.
At the same time the United States Senate has begun to move towards a vote on ratifying the ten year old United Nations Law of the Sea in recognition that Washington has no present locus in any international debate on the future of the Arctic seabed.
Only Norway, which also has a claim on the Arctic, to its credit, has considered the global environmental implications of claiming the Arctic.
What this is all about is an economic opportunity of a kind that has not arisen for the developed world for centuries: the availability of a vast tract of land with an unclear legal title containing as much as a quarter of the world’s untapped oil reserves. It also represents an opportunity to use for at least part of the year, a new low cost trade route between the Pacific and the Atlantic.
The implication of this quiet struggle for Arctic supremacy is that the nations concerned have reliable scientific projections about the further thinning of the polar ice sheet.
This carries an alarming environmental message for the Caribbean as the melting of the Arctic ice cap not only denotes a rise in sea temperatures and less predictable tropical weather, but also presages sea level change.
Although scientific opinion is inexact, studies indicate that a one-foot rise in sea level could translate in up to a 200-foot retreat of shoreline because of wave and tidal action. Given that most estimates of sea level change suggest something between a one and two foot rise this century, it is not hard to imagine the economic implications for the Caribbean region where most communities and economic activity are adjacent to the shore.
In the last week, Caribbean foreign ministers attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, without exception raised the region’s concerns about climate change.
Speaking on October 2, Charles Savarin, Dominica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, said that sea level change threatened the territorial existence of small island developing states. These, he said, “may simply disappear in the next thirty years or less.”
“The beaches, coastal tourism plant and loss of coastal communications infrastructure would devastate the tourism economy of most island states
