The Arctic is changing faster than almost anywhere on Earth.
Rapid warming and sea ice melt are impacting Arctic ecosystems, with large-scale economic and political repercussions. Sea melt has severely threatened food security for Indigenous communities, disrupting traditional hunting seasons, altering wildlife migrations, and making travel routes unstable.
These patterns have also created renewed sets of international governance challenges, with world powers (the United States, the European Union, China, and Denmark, primarily) in conflict over exposed rare earth minerals and new polar transit and shipping lanes in Greenland.
Harvard’s Arctic Initiative, launched in 2017, brings together researchers to examine these problems and map out opportunities for action. Among those closely engaged with the initiative is John P. Holdren, the former Heinz professor of environmental policy and current research professor at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where he co-directs the Science, Technology, and Public Policy track.
Holdren served as U.S. President Barack Obama’s science advisor and as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2009 to 2017 (the longest tenure in the history of the position). His responsibilities included advising the president on climate and energy, oceans and the Arctic, national security, and other major science and technology issues, as well as coordinating federal research and development policy. He previously served on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Clinton administration and led studies on energy innovation and nuclear arms control. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. What makes the Arctic such an important region to study right now?
The area north of the Arctic Circle covers about 8 million square miles, 70 percent of it open and ice-covered ocean. The region has around 4 million inhabitants, half [of them] Russian, 10 percent of the total Indigenous.
Life in the Arctic is challenging for those who live there—above all for the Indigenous population—and it’s becoming more so because of rapid climate change in the region (occurring about three times faster than the global average). But the importance of the Arctic to the rest of the world is far out of proportion to its seemingly remote location and small population: economically, because of its rich mineral resources and new trade routes as the Arctic Ocean sea ice shrinks; environmentally, because impacts of Arctic climate change reverberate around the world; geopolitically, because its location at the top of the world tightly couples the vast expanse of northern Russia with northern Europe, Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.
2. The Arctic is experiencing rapid environmental change, while geopolitical forces jockey for control. What does that mean for the region’s future?
The impacts on infrastructure, public health, and ecosystems are compounding the challenges (and costs) facing the people and economies of the region, producing growing stress on Arctic governance from the local to the national.
Increasing interest in Arctic resources is intensifying long-standing tensions between developing mineral deposits and protecting ecosystems and the lifestyles and livelihoods dependent on them. Militarily, the Arctic has been of interest to countries bordering it since World War II, but until recently those interests and the global geopolitical situation have not impeded a high degree of international cooperation on Arctic science, marine safety, conservation, and even Arctic Ocean fisheries among the eight nations with territories north of the Arctic Circle. That has now changed.
3. What areas do the Arctic Initiative’s faculty and researchers focus on?
Since its inception, the Arctic Initiative has had five major focuses: (1) increasing understanding of the pace of permafrost thaw and its impacts on the people and economies of the region and on global climate change (2) sustainable management of the Arctic Ocean (3) resilience and adaptation to Arctic climate change, with emphasis on energy, infrastructure, and public health (4) Arctic governance, cooperation, and diplomacy (5) communication, training, and leadership development in all of these domains.
4. How does the Arctic Initiative bring together expertise from science, policy, security, and other fields?
Our locus in the HKS’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides great access to faculty, students, and fellows in all those domains. We have collaborators in the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Harvard Medical School, among other campus entities.
Additionally, we collaborate with other Arctic researchers across the United States and the Arctic; work with Indigenous leaders in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Norway; and engage regularly with Arctic-focused government officials in the United States, Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway.
5. What developments in the Arctic should policymakers and the broader public be paying closest attention to over the next few years?
We must all focus on the critical importance of nurturing continuing cooperation on the many Arctic issues that require it—above all, limiting the harms from rapid Arctic climate change—while avoiding the complete transformation of the Arctic into a zone of competition and conflict.
