Troy Bouffard & Gennaro D'Angelo, Gabrielle F. Gundry, Travis R. Pitts, Stephen F. Price and Andrew F. Roberts
This article examines Russia’s efforts to regulate navigation along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and tests the legal premise for those efforts under UNCLOS Article 234 (“ice-covered areas”). We present updated, model-based risk estimates derived from CMIP6 sea-ice projections and the IMO POLARIS framework. Results indicate steadily declining navigation risk for PC6 (and stronger) vessels for six months of the year through the 2030s, undermining Russia’s risk-based justification for expansive regulatory control out to the EEZ. We outline implications for freedom of navigation and the dangers of allowing these practices to calcify into customary international law, and we recommend how user states can incorporate refined risk evidence into legal, diplomatic, and operational responses.
