Is Alaska about to enter its most challenging period? I think so.
For purposes of transparency let me state that I have never been to Alaska; I don't know the people, the ecology, or the politics. But I have some experience doing sustainable tropical forestry in America and Southeast Asia. As I thought of the Arctic, I saw some potential parallels between these two radically different ecosystems.
Before tropical forestry I started my professional career in the fundamental analysis and trading of commodities (mostly petroleum products and metals). What I know of tropical forestry and commodity markets has sent off some warning bells for what Alaska may face in the immediate future.
There are three areas of change that will have huge effects on your lives. These three areas are 1) access, 2) ecological risk, and 3) property rights and markets.
Access
We have all become accustomed to seeing satellite images of roads through tropical forests and the concomitant rash of deforestation along those roads. Global warming has the potential to create a new Northwest Passage -- a "road" through the Arctic.
This "road" will provide easy access not only for the "big three" (Canada, Russia, USA) but also for Asian companies and nations. As the area of the Arctic Ocean ( ~15 million square kilometers) is about double the size of the Brazilian Amazon forest (~5.5 million square kilometers), one might look out for similar scale-related issues, such as illegal resource development, illegal settlement, and encroachment into indigenous areas. If you are worried now about those activities, just add the Bering Sea, another 2 million square kilomters, or about 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean, just for icing on the cake.
This road will also become a site of multinational negotiations (and wrangling) similar to the trans-Amazon highway. That highway was advertised partly as a trans-continental highway but was really financed by Brazil to establish national sovereignty in an area with porous borders. Ultimately, connecting roads have sprung up financed by multi-lateral financial institutions. Once built, the roads have become a fait accompli and traditional rights have been (sometimes highly) circumscribed. On the other hand, absent illegal activities, costs for transporting Brazilian goods both to and from markets have plummeted and quality of life has, in some ways,risen.
Another access issue is access to pristine areas: An extreme example is the tension between alternatives such as ecotourism (a long-term growth business but one which requires huge expenditures up front) vs. extraction of resources.
We've been there before. Starting in approximately 1990 a many-branched approach to preserving rainforests began. Ultimately, the various approaches fell into two camps: 'use-it-or-lose-it' and 'preserve-it'. As the Arctic region has a population density of (perhaps) 1/20th of that of the Amazon basin (~0.15 people per square kilometer vs. ~3 people per square kilometer) either solution will be subject to issues of scale that no one has yet addressed effectively anywhere in the world.
The idea behind use-it-or-lose-it is that private firms, well policed, have a vested interest in maintaining ecosystem quality when they have rights to harvest sustainably in their areas. (Think about current thinking on fishing rights.) On the other hand, if natural areas appear to have no economic value, they will be converted to uses that do have apparent value. ("Worthless" tropical forests turn into soybeans or cattle farms.)
Historically and technically, many tropical forests could support a use-it-or-lose-it approach as the ecology was relatively resilient. In theory, this approach had promise. But funding constraints coupled with high perceived political risk in tropical countries limited the early effectiveness of landscape-scale private-sector, tropical forest management. Twenty years later, Brazil is carefully auctioning off large forest concessions for sustainable management following the lead of early adopters like Bolivia (1996).
In addition, some forests are just too fragile to accept any long-term industrial use. For example, Patagonian forests south of 50 degrees latitude should have cutting cycles of 100-200 years, long enough so that the biological life cycle extends further than practical institutional and legal frameworks and lifespans.
Similarly, resources in the Arctic could very well face analogous issues. That points to establishing extremely effective institutional frameworks. (Hypothetical example: assume a special plant is discovered that is an effective cure for cancer. In the tropics, that plant and ecosystem might regenerate in a year or two; in the Arctic it might take one or two centuries. Who's around to police that vast area? And are they around in 100 years?)
In contrast to private sector management, the preserve-it camp was highly funded by a myriad of sources. But ultimately parks and national forests haven't worked effectively in the tropics, with a handful of exceptions. (Costa Rica is one example where the system has worked better than in other areas. Still, even there national parks are under constant threat.) Partly, the issue is population pressure to convert those areas to uses that can support short-term survival. And, partly, the issue is the attractiveness of natural resources within the park borders (timber, gold, animals.)
Where parks have worked, they need a substantial flow of paying park goers and need to straddle the very fine line between convenient access for users and easy access to poachers of all types.
Parks have also worked in countries with very established legal systems (like the USA) though even in those countries there is a fair amount of evidence demonstrating that governments are poor long-term stewards of natural resources.
Ecological risk
Tropical forests have been manipulated for millennia by indigenous populations. But as small-scale (<1 hectare) slash-and-burn subsistence techniques grew into large-scale (>100 hectare) clearing, the forest lost its resilience and it fragmented. This fragmentation -- essentially the loss of large areas of contiguous forest -- is the single biggest threat to tropical forest ecosystems because the landscape scale processes (hydrological, migration, seed dispersal, biodiversity reservoirs, animal migration) have become significantly less resilient.
Look for similar issues in the Arctic where fragmentation may take the form of patchwork ice or glacier fields or large areas of water where none existed previously.
Unlike tropical forests, large scale land mammal migration does occur extensively in the Arctic. Disruption and change to these patterns are a key risk and, if managed correctly, could be an opportunity for traditional management. Perhaps crowberries are the next Açaí berries -- not outside the realm of possibility given that researchers have already found high levels of active antioxidants in the Arctic staple. The trick will be to be agile and nimble. The climate change is happening quickly, few people have any useful experience in these northern latitudes, and intelligence and creativity brought to bear on the problems could mean the difference between disaster and triumph.
Property rights and markets
Local indigenous groups and traditional land holdings enjoy unparalleled legal status in the Arctic compared with tropical countries. Two of the three big three Arctic nations (Canada and USA) both have strong legal systems for First Nations or Native Corporations. These frameworks, coupled with the relatively powerful rule of law in both countries, are probably the single biggest promise and advantage that the Arctic area holds.
But, because of the combination of vast landscape scale and small populations, there is a high risk for illegal incursion into both public commons and traditionally owned or controlled areas. Fortunately, technology exists to monitor much of that incursion, assuming that current satellite paths and spectra cover the Arctic to the same extent as in more populated areas. Methods of patrol and enforcement in areas between 50 degrees south and north latitude aren't likely to work in the Arctic. You may have to invent this yourselves.
Markets can be a blessing and a curse. Clearly natural resources are abundant in the Arctic but have high extraction costs. In addition, the cost of environmental protection and mitigation measures are likely to be very high too. Those high costs, in turn, suggest that there could be strong pressure for illegal extraction to avoid the cost of environmental protection and mitigation. Look for illegal extraction and all the problematic issues that go with avoidance of high operational taxes (bribery, corruption, etc.).
Prices for commodities have three components ("basis"): quality, time, and location. In the Arctic, the location basis is likely to be very large, though the promise of a Northwest Passage may, paradoxically, make the location basis more advantageous for some commodities than one might expect.
Establishing the correct system and level of rents for Arctic resources is critical. One might argue that the current royalty system and levels (ranging from USA royalties of 12.5 percent of gross to Canadian-style royalties at 5 percent on an increasing basis) work effectively in the Lower 48 or in similar areas. But working in the Arctic -- as the petroleum companies can affirm -- is much closer to working on Mars than in Manaus. It might be worth re-thinking the flow of resources and their revenues in light of local purses, not federal or private ones.
Ultimately, Alaska has the opportunity to make an omelet out of the cracked egg of a rapidly melting Arctic. It should start a public conversation now about where it wants to go and how it wants to get there. Although Alaskans can draw upon other experiences around the world to help, no one else can really match your knowledge of local conditions. So, you must continue to be pioneers in forging new solutions.
Jeffrey S. Atkin graduated from Amherst College in 1979. He was a principal of an exchange-based trading firm and two commercial petroleum trading companies. In 1991, he founded and developed Sustainable Forest Systems LP (SFS) and created one of the world's first integrated and sustainably managed tropical hardwood businesses, in Paraguay. More recently, SFS extended the concept in Bolivia, working extensively with community and indigenous groups to secure long-term timber leases and create an FSC-certified timber resource of approximately 550,000 hectares with associated processing capacity.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch. Alaska Dispatch welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.