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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Dubois, Shestakov & Tesar
Critical Review of the AOR Recommendations
The AOR mandate:
―The overall goal of the AOR project is to provide guidance to the Arctic Council Ministers as a
means to strengthen governance and to achieve desired environmental, economic and socio-cultural
outcomes in the Arctic through a cooperative, coordinated and integrated approach to the
management of the Arctic marine environment‖.
Overall, WWF welcomes and supports the AOR findings and policy recommendations and will
work with partners to follow up on them to attain the goal of ensuring that
the shipping industry in the
Arctic operates sustainably and responsibly to ensure ecosystems are protected and local communities are assured a
prosperous future
.
The concluding chapter of the AOR just listed policy recommendations from sectoral chapters and
did not provide integrative analysis of Arctic Ocean governance. A most prominent aspect of Arctic
governance that needs strengthening and that is partly accommodated by the synthesis chapter, is
addressing rapid climate change in the Arctic. A search through the chapters reveals that ‗climate
change‘ is mentioned as a challenge, first and foremost in the ‗Indigenous Peoples and Cultures‘
chapter and also in the ‗Marine Living Resources‘ chapter, but there is a need to clarify activities,
processes, or mechanisms that address this challenge in the Arctic, for achieving desired outcomes.
In the functional category labeled as
coordination across institutions
, the recommendations remain
ironically sector-focused. Sector integration is supposed to be covered by the Ecosystem-Based
Management (EBM) recommendations, but while it provides a blueprint for such integration it
doesn't refer back and map on concretely to the findings of the sector chapters, the fisheries
resources among others. The latter is necessary to highlight the integrative feature of EBM and the
concluding chapter failed to illustrate this.
All recommendations need to be focused on better implementation and further practical work and
not predominantly on information exchange and new reports. This follows the general
developments and recent discussions within the Arctic Council and should be the future of this
intergovernmental process which WWF strongly supports. The AOR Report clearly identified a
number of gaps in regulations and instruments. These gaps need to be recognized as an opportunity
to increase the efficiency of collaborative management in the Arctic by Arctic states and openly
identify, where appropriate, new instruments needed.
The AOR recommendations should more often include other stakeholders such as observers, non-
Arctic states, and research organizations who are all part of the political landscape through which
any policy must be navigated. The engagement of partners may significantly increase efficiency of
the process and help to achieve better conservation results in the Arctic Ocean. The final set of
recommendations seems to be more driven by ―political acceptance‖ rather than by the overarching
goal to ensure that Arctic marine ecosystems remain resilient in the face of rapid change Arctic