Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Who Owns the Arctic?
With the Russian flag planting last monthn and Canada promising to build military bases, the race for the Arctic has begun in earnest. Some of the better news articles can be found below. A most intriguing suggestion by my Energy Law students is that the Arctic Circle indigenous peoples, who currently have six non-voting participants in the Arctic Council, could seek recognition as a sovereign nation -- and assert claims against all of the current claimants. That would certainly change the terms of debate!
Chicago Tribute link
Arctic claims are poles apartRussian flag-planting a signal of global race for vast oil, gas deposits <>
By Tom Hundley
Tribune foreign correspondent
TROMSO, Norway
Not
since 1925, when local hero Roald Amundsen set off from here on his
first attempt to fly over the North Pole, has there been so much
excitement in Tromso, a picturesque port that has long been used as a
staging area for Arctic exploration.
The buzz began early this month when an expedition led by Russian
lawmakers used a miniature submarine to plant a Russian flag on the
seabed 2 miles under the North Pole, symbolically staking a claim to
the vast mineral and energy wealth that lies under the ice cap.
That ruffled feathers in Canada, another country with Arctic ambitions.
"This isn't the 15th Century," scoffed Foreign Minister Peter McKay,
referring to a time when explorers claimed whole continents for God and
king.
But a week later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canada's far
north and announced plans to build two military bases in its polar
regions. And now two more claimants to the Arctic seas, the U.S. and
Denmark, have launched their own polar mapping expeditions. The Danish
team set sail from Tromso Aug. 12, while the American icebreaker Healy
departed from Barrow, Alaska, last week.
The flurry of activity recalls the heyday of polar expeditions a
century ago when Robert Peary, Richard Byrd, Robert Scott, Amundsen and
others raced to be the first to the Arctic and then the Antarctic.
But as the latter-day scramble for strategic resources beneath the ice
begins to heat up, Norway, a country with deep Arctic roots both
physical and psychological, takes the long view. The Norwegian
government has emphasized the need to structure a long-term system of
international governance for the polar regions; its scientists and
researchers are calling for cooperation rather than competition.
Here in Tromso, 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Russia's flag-planting produced wry smiles.
'A kind of showbiz act'
"Most people here saw it as a kind of showbiz act, more for internal
political purposes than for international science or research," said
Geir Gotaas head of administration at Tromso University's Roald
Amundsen Center for Arctic Research.
"It doesn't mean a thing," said university President Jarle Aarbakke.
"All it does is confirm what we knew in advance -- that the Russians
are very interested in the polar region."
The reason is no secret. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that
about a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas lies beneath
the Arctic's waters.
Until recently, these deposits were thought inaccessible. But as the
polar ice cap succumbs to global warming more quickly than expected and
with new subsurface pumping technologies coming online, some experts
believe the Arctic could go into production in a generation.
While there is some uncertainty about the causes of climate change, the
fact that it is occurring is not in dispute, especially in the polar
regions, where temperatures are rising at double the rate of those in
more temperate latitudes, and the ice cap is melting three times faster
than anticipated.
What this means, according to a UN climate survey published earlier
this year, is that the polar ice cap will no longer be a year-round
phenomenon, and the world is likely to have a new navigable ocean in
about 2030-2050.
Going "over the top" would shorten the sea route between the Far East
and Western Europe by a third. A major realignment of the world's
shipping lanes would result. Fish stocks also would migrate north,
bringing fishing fleets.
All of this would bring profound change to Norway, a small nation of
4.5 million people that tends to think of itself as an isolated country
on the northern periphery of Europe. Suddenly, it would find itself
thrust into the thick of things.
For Norwegians, the Arctic has always been an important part of their national identity and patrimony.
"We don't have a culture of heroes in Norway, but Amundsen is a hero,"
said Gunn Sissel Jaklin, communications director at the Norwegian Polar
Institute, a research organization in Tromso.
"Exploring the Arctic is part of Norwegian history; it was part of
establishing ourselves as a nation and forming a national identity,"
she said.
On his recent tour of Canada's Arctic region, Prime Minister Harper
declared that "Canada's new government understands that the first
principle of Arctic sovereignty is: Use it or lose it." Canada's claims
include sovereignty over the Northwest Passage sea lanes, a potential
source of disagreement with the United States.
The "use it or lose it" philosophy is something Norwegian governments have always understood.
"Norway's strategy to protect its claim is, No. 1, to be present.
Presence is used to research, develop and harvest the Arctic," said
Tromso University's Aarbakke.
"You have to be there on the sea, with the coast guard. You have to
take pirate fishing very seriously. And when it comes to oil and gas,
you have to be there at the negotiating table, with the scientific
proofs," he said.
For Norway, the elephant in the room is actually a bear. Norway shares
a 120-mile Arctic border with Russia, and the Norwegians learned long
ago that you don't poke the Russian bear in the eye.
Which explains, in part, Norway's studied non-reaction to Russia's underwater flag-waving.
"The Russians are doing what the UN asked them to do -- they are
substantiating their claim. It's in compliance with international law
... and the commission will decide if they are right or wrong," said
Liv Monica Stubholt, Norway's deputy minister for foreign affairs,
referring to the UN's Commission on the Limitations of the Continental
Shelf, a body of scientists that reviews claims to territory beneath
the sea.
In the Arctic, the key dispute is whether the Lomonosov Ridge, a vast
underwater mountain range stretching across the North Pole, is an
extension of Russia's continental shelf, or a part of Greenland, which
belongs to Denmark.
Rather than point fingers at Russia, Stubholt said Norway would prefer
to see the U.S. Senate ratify the 13-year-old UN Convention on the Law
of the Sea, which would give the U.S. a seat on the commission and a
stake in a non-belligerent resolution of the competing claims.
Ratification has been blocked by a line of conservative lawmakers going
back to former Sen. Jesse Helms, (R.-N.C.) and today led Sen. James
Inhofe (R.-Okla.). They fear that signing the treaty would cede too
much control to the UN.
Administration backs treaty
But the Bush administration now favors signing the treaty, and Sen.
Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Foreign
Relations Committee, will try to muster support for its ratification
when Congress reconvenes.
"If the U.S. doesn't sign the treaty soon, they will be put aside when
the decisions are taken," said Johan Petter Barlindhaug, a Tromso
businessman who specializes in Arctic construction projects.
Toronto Star Link
The Arctic Cold War
Andrew Chung
With
precious little ability to enforce its claims in the Arctic, Canada may
be falling behind in asserting itself not in law, but in real life.Others
think cases where conflicts are already apparent – Canada and Denmark
have claims to the same continental shelf as Russia, even if we don't
precisely know where those claims lie – render the commission
irrelevant. "The commission can't deal with information presented where
there is a conflict," explains University of Victoria's Ted McDorman,
an expert in the Law of the Sea. "It has no power to decide ... so like
other ocean boundary disputes, it will ultimately come down to some
level of negotiation. Political negotiation."In these cases, power may, in the end, trump
international law in determining who gets what in the Arctic, he says.
"Power means the ability to keep other people out."He doesn't think
there would be war, but the concern is "Russia has a head start,"
Posner argues. "It's got a lot of ships that can operate in the Arctic.
Canada has very few."Byers has
said Canada needs heavy-duty icebreakers, not the smaller vessels the
government has promised to the navy, to properly assert its sovereignty
in the Passage, but also to properly research its claim to the Arctic
seabed.<> Foreign
minister Peter MacKay was indeed correct when he said of Russia’s
provocative flag planting in the North Pole’s sea bed that, “This isn’t
the 15th Century.” He was suggesting that in our modern, more
civilized world, codified international law, and not antediluvian games
of finders-keepers, will decide claims of geographic ownership. And
Russia, a sophisticated player in global diplomacy, has made statements
in the past that it couldn’t agree more. But then MacKay's
Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, said he was amazed by Canada's
response. "We're not throwing flags around," he told the Russian media.
"We just do what other discoverers did." Most experts believe
that international law, in the form of the United Nations' Convention
on the Law of the Sea, will play an integral role in figuring out the
unfolding conflict in the Arctic. But don't count out the
intrepid explorers of yesteryear and the kind of de facto international
law they practised. In spite of the convention, some believe it's
possible for countries to operate in a manner predating international
law – or to ignore whatever decisions may flow from it. The
story of the Arctic is still one of the future. Currently, it's a
frozen hinterland, but with the polar ice caps melting, some
predictions have it opening up to serious exploration and economic
exploitation within 30 years. And the U.S. Geological Survey estimates
that 25 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas remains locked
up deep beneath the frigid waters. "It's striking that the
confluence of high energy prices and melting has created a vast new
area that countries are going to have to fight over," says
international law specialist Eric Posner. "Not necessarily in a
military sense, but they will struggle over this area, and we haven't
had a situation like this for quite a long time." One of the main
struggles will be over the 1,800-kilometre-long Lomonosov Ridge between
Siberia and Canada's Ellesmere Island. Russia believes the ridge
belongs to it, and therefore so does the North Pole. Its dramatic
submarine dive in the Arctic this month, the first to reach the polar
sea bottom and carried out by Russian scientists, was to "prove" that
fact. The next step is for Russia to submit its scientific
findings to a UN commission of geological experts struck to review any
country's claim to the sea bed far beyond its borders – a "continental
shelf." These procedures were set out in the 1982 Law of the Sea
Convention, regarded as one of the most important pieces of
international law, governing the use of our vast oceans and their rich
resources. For many centuries, the seas belonged to no one.
Except for a narrow band around a nation's coastline, the high seas
were a free-for- all. But growing concerns over foreign fishing vessels
and pollution, and knowledge of the rich mineral and oil wealth under
the sea floor, changed everything. In 1945, U.S. President Harry
Truman unilaterally tossed aside the freedom-of-the-seas doctrine and
proclaimed exclusive ownership of its huge continental shelf. Other
countries, including Canada, soon followed, asserting control over
waters sometimes hundreds of kilometres beyond their borders. By the
1950s, oil drilling on the ocean floor was rapidly expanding. The
Law of the Sea eventually gave legal status to navigational rights,
resources, marine protection and territorial sea limits, as well as a
way to settle disputes. It established a generous "exclusive economic
zone" for coastal states, extending 320 kilometres from their
shorelines. But potential riches, from gas and oil to diamonds and
gold, didn't always stop there. States realized continental shelves
would need to be accounted for. A process to submit claims to
these extensions and a commission to evaluate them and make
recommendations was set up. Russia made the first claim, in 2001,
followed by Brazil and six other countries. The most recent was France
earlier this year. Canada has yet to make its claim. How that process will play out remains anyone's guess, because no claim has yet been resolved. For
this country, says Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in global
politics and international law at UBC, the Law of the Sea is "a good
news story in terms of the rule of law and of multilateral cooperation
in a situation where one of the alternatives is a military contest over
resources, which is the last thing any sane person from a less powerful
country would want. International law is what protects our interests
most of the time." Byers says the conflict over the Arctic
involves only those areas where nations' continental shelves may
"overlap," perhaps less than 10 per cent of any claims made or yet to
come. He maintains that the fact the treaty is steeped in science,
along with the expertise of the commission, will lend the whole process
legitimacy and compel countries to accept the commission's
recommendations. But even if it's all about science, this won't be an exact science.
Countries will, for instance, try to justify ownership over the same
seabed. "The Russians are going to make the most extensive claim
possible," Byers predicts. "It will be based on an interpretation of
the scientific evidence that is as favourable to them as possible." International law
allows for disputes to be adjudicated through a special Law of the Sea
Tribunal. But Canada and Russia, in ratifying the treaty, both declared
they would opt out of being compelled to send a dispute over maritime
boundaries to the tribunal. It could be years before nations
reach that stage. Canada is still gathering details for its submissions
to the UN. Countries have just 10 years after ratifying the Law of the
Sea to submit claims. For Canada, this means 2013. Meanwhile,
Russia isn't wasting a moment. It has capitalized on its stable of
useful vessels, nuclear-powered icebreakers for instance, to show that
it's serious about the north. "The Arctic always was Russian, and it
will remain Russian," expedition leader Artur Chilingarov said last
week. "Why drop their flag" at the North Pole? asks Posner of the
University of Chicago. "I take it as a signal they're going to claim
this regardless of what the UN commission is going to say sometime in
the future." In other words, states could ignore the UN
commission or simply not comply with their international legal
obligations. "Usually they make a legalistic argument, which may be
implausible, but they make it anyway and go ahead and do whatever they
want to do." Posner
considers Russia's flag caper less benign than most, reflective of a
more "aggressive" Russia, seeking to reclaim through energy dominance
the global stature once held by the Soviet Union. Planting a flag could be more important
than we think, says Robert Miller, an expert in the "Doctrine of
Discovery," which started with Pope Nicholas V in 1455 and was used by
New World explorers to lay divine right over land for European
Christian societies. "There are definitions in the treaty, and
Russia is trying to prove that the ridge runs to the North Pole. That's
outside the parameters of the Doctrine of Discovery," says Miller, who
teaches at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. "But look
at how Russia is dotting its i's and crossing its t's by planting a
flag. If they can't win this, they're doing what lawyers do all the
time: try to prove it in a different way. They could say, `We were the
first to have planted a flag on the seabed.' "The treaty supplemented the Doctrine of Discovery," Miller argues. "It didn't replace it." The
idea of planting flags and showing up every now and then – say at a
deserted island – to show you exert control is called "effective
occupation." Byers says Canada has done this with Hans Island in the
Arctic, whose ownership it disputes with Denmark. Some experts
suggest that while control of an area used to occur before sovereignty
was established, today sovereignty over an area must be established by
international law before taking control. Law may be supreme on
paper, but there's something to be said for the old behaviours. That's
why there are growing calls for the government to do more to assert
Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Aside from
continental-shelf claims, the Northwest Passage, which links the
Atlantic and Pacific, is of primary importance for this country. As the
climate warms, the ice pack preventing shipping could open up a much
quicker route from Europe to China. Canada considers the
Passage to be inland waters. Other nations, including the U.S., say
it's part of the high seas, and want free access. Byers has
said Canada needs heavy-duty icebreakers, not the smaller vessels the
government has promised to the navy, to properly assert its sovereignty
in the Passage, but also to properly research its claim to the Arctic
seabed. One solution, Posner says, may be for Canada and the U.S.
to work together to counterbalance Russian designs on the area – Canada
with its knowledge, the U.S. with its money and military power. "The
only question for Canada and the U.S. is, how much effort (do they)
want to start making in order to limit what Russia can get away with?"
He has a hunch
that, if the ice cap continues to melt and energy prices keep rising,
Russia will send more and more ships into the Arctic. Eventually,
"they'll define an area, maybe what they've claimed already, maybe
less, and say, `This is our water,' and come up with an excuse, such as
the Eurasian continent extends below this, `and we'd be happy to sell
licences to extract oil and gas,' and so on."
|
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website |
The Russians are leading a new "gold rush" in the high north, with a bold attempt to assert a claim to oil, gas and mineral rights over large parts of the Arctic Ocean up to the North Pole.
Russia's most famous explorer, Artur Chilingarov, complete with nautical beard, led the expedition to plant the Russian flag in a capsule on the ocean seabed under the pole itself.
"The Arctic is Russian," Chilingarov said earlier. "We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian coastal shelf."
Russia is claiming that an underwater mountain known as the Lomonosov Ridge is actually an extension of the Russian landmass.
This, it argues, justifies its claim to a triangular area up to the pole, giving it rights under the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention.
Under Article 76 of the convention, a state can claim a 200 nautical mile exclusive zone and beyond that up to 150 nautical miles of rights on the seabed. The baseline from which these distances are measured depends on where the continental shelf ends.
Russia lodged a formal claim in 2001 but the UN's Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf told it to resubmit the claim. The flag-planting can be seen as a symbolic gesture in support.
At the same time, other states are acting to protect their interests in the Arctic. Canada is planning to build up to eight new patrol ships and the US Congress is considering a proposal to build two new heavy polar ships.
The rush for the Arctic has become more frenzied because of the melting of parts of the polar ice cap, which will allow easier exploration, and by the urgent need for new sources of oil and gas. A new sense of nationalism is also evident in Russia.
The ice thaw is predicted by a team of international researchers whose Arctic Climate Impact Assessment suggested in 2004 that the summer ice cap could melt completely before the end of this century because of global warming.
If the ice retreats, it could open up new shipping routes and new areas where natural resources could be exploited.
The US Geological Survey estimates that a quarter of the world's undiscovered energy resources lies in Arctic areas.
At the moment, nobody's shelf extends up to the North Pole so there is an international area around the Pole administered by the International Seabed Authority from Kingston, Jamaica.
But quite apart from the Russian claim there are multiple other disputes.
The US and Canada argue over rights in the North-west Passage, Norway and Russia differ over the Barents Sea, Canada and Denmark are competing over a small island off Greenland, the Russian parliament is refusing to ratify an agreement with the US over the Bering Sea and Denmark is claiming the North Pole itself.
North Pole solutions
The five countries involved are considering two other potential ways of sharing the region, in which all the sea would be divided between them.
The "median line method", supported by Canada and Denmark, would divide the Arctic waters between countries according to their length of nearest coastline. This would give Denmark the Pole itself but Canada would gain as well.
The "sector method" would take the North Pole as the centre and draw lines south along longitudes. This would penalise Canada but Norway and, to a lesser extent, Russia, would gain.
One major problem is that the United States has not ratified the 1982 UN convention, largely because senators did not want to have international restrictions placed on American actions.
However, in May 2007, Senator Richard Lugar, a senior Republican, pleaded for ratification in the light of the Russian moves, saying that an American voice was needed at the negotiating table.
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