Arctic Yearbook 2012
New Directions for Governance in the Arctic Region
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Similarly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been working on an
Arctic EBM project since 2010. Although it is not a formal Arctic Council project, the IUCN, which
is an observer to the Arctic Council, has been collaborating with the Council’s EBM expert group.
In many ways, the Arctic Council’s current approach to Arctic marine management is reminiscent of
the overly deliberative, overly scientific
modus operandi
that the Council was criticized for in the past
(see Huebert, VanderZwag, Ferrara, Elferink and Rothwell, 2001). However there are hopes that this
painstaking approach will result in slow, steady build-up of political support for an eco-systems based
scheme to monitor, regulate and enforce human marine activity, perhaps in the form of a regional
seas agreement or something similar.
Fisheries
Arctic and sub-Arctic fisheries are critically important to regional economies and local indigenous
subsistence in the North. As global warming affects the Arctic ecosystem, changes are certain to
come. The
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
(ACIA) projected that some major arctic marine fisheries,
including those for herring and cod, are likely to become more productive as climate warms, while
Arctic char, broad whitefish, and Arctic cisco, which are major contributors to the diets of local
people, are threatened by a warming climate (ACIA, 2004: 17).
Many fisheries worldwide have benefitted from regional fisheries management organizations
(RFMOs), including in sub-Arctic regions such as the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization
(NAFO: Canada, Greenland and France/St. Pierre & Miquelon); the NorthEast Atlantic Fisheries
Commission (NEAFC: Denmark/Greenland, EU, Iceland, Norway, Russia); and the North Pacific
Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC: Canada, Japan, South Korea, Russia and United States).
Encouragingly, all eight Arctic states have ratified the
UN Fish Stocks Agreement
. Article 9.2 of the
agreement provides guidance for the creation of new regional organizations to manage fisheries as
well as means by which Arctic stocks can be monitored (Article 14) and means of enforcement
(Article 19) (Huebert and Yeager, 2008: 26). But while it seems likely that at some point an RFMO to
manage Arctic high seas will be necessary, to date the Arctic Council has neglected the issue, even in
terms of commissioning basic fisheries research including the development of future scenarios about
areas, dates, species, fishing techniques for which new fishing opportunities are likely to arise and
potential impacts for non-target species (Koivurova and Molenaar, 2010: 51). This has been the
bread and butter of the work of the Arctic Council, and would easily fall within the mandate of the