\n<\/p>\n
When the Chinese cargo freighter Istanbul Bridge set sail for Europe in late September, it took an unusual route. Instead of heading south for the 40-day voyage through the Suez Canal, it tacked north. The freighter arrived in the United Kingdom at the port of Felixstowe just 20 days later\u2014successfully launching the first-ever Arctic commercial-container route from Asia to Europe.<\/p>\n
For most of human history, the surface of the world\u2019s northernmost ocean has been largely frozen. Now scientists predict that most of the Arctic Ocean\u2019s 6.1 million square miles may be seasonally ice-free as soon as 2050. Economically, a less icy Arctic spells opportunity\u2014new shipping routes and untapped fossil-fuel reserves. Climatologically, it\u2019s a calamity. Legally, it\u2019s a problem that has to be solved.<\/p>\n
Much of the ocean\u2019s center, the northernmost stretch surrounding the pole, will be subject to the lawlessness of the high seas\u2014which will become a problem as more ships try to navigate a mushy mix of water and sea ice. And although the Arctic is the world\u2019s fastest-warming region, and contains its most rapidly acidifiying ocean, it has few environmental protections. Scientists don\u2019t have a clear idea of which species might need defending, or of the climate effects of unbridled shipping. (Ships puff black carbon, which reduces ice reflectivity and, in the short term, causes up to 1,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide.)<\/p>\n
In October, the United Nation\u2019s special envoy for the ocean, Peter Thomson, called for countries to agree to a \u201cprecautionary pause on new economic activities in the Central Arctic Ocean\u201d to buy time to study the climate and environmental risks of increased activity. Others are asking for an agreement akin to the 2020 Artemis Accords, which committed 59 nations to the \u201cpeaceful\u201d and \u201csustainable\u201d exploration of space. But some polar-law scholars argue that curbing climate catastrophe may require a more radical reimagining: to make sea ice a legal person.<\/p>\n
For centuries of seafaring, ice was an obstacle blocking people out, not an environment anyone thought to protect. Even in the Arctic, \u201cwe have laws about the land, we have the Law of the Sea, but we don\u2019t have laws about ice,\u201d Apostolos Tsiouvalas, a postdoctoral researcher with the Arctic University of Norway, told me. Because dealing with ice hasn\u2019t been a major concern, even for the five nations that border the Arctic, and because ice is always transforming, its place in the law is confused at best.<\/p>\n
In many cases, solid ice extending from a coastline has been treated as legal land, and ice carried by a current has been considered water. During the Cold War, both Russia and the United States maintained scientific \u201cdrift stations\u201d on detached ice floes. In 1970, when a shooting occurred on one American station, several nations debated where, exactly, the crime took place. Was the ice Canadian, because it likely calved from a glacier on Canada\u2019s coast? Was it an American island? After some back-and-forth, the vessel-size chunk of ice legally transformed\u2014by no small imaginative leap\u2014into an American ship.<\/p>\n
The so-called Arctic Exception of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does extend states\u2019 rights to impose laws far from the coastline, in areas that are ice-covered for most of the year. The point was for Arctic states to help prevent accidents and pollution, but states have since used the exception to extend their geographical sovereignty. But the term ice-covered<\/em> complicates these claims. How much ice means \u201ccovered\u201d? Are we talking uncrossably frozen, or just a few drifting bits?<\/p>\n That\u2019s the problem with regulating icy regions: Even if these cryo-categories were more formalized, none would apply for very long. A large majority of Arctic ice is sea ice, which forms on ocean surfaces when salt water freezes. (It\u2019s distinct from icebergs, which calve from landbound glaciers.) Human activity may have accelerated its melt, but sea ice was already one of the planet\u2019s most dynamic systems, its surface area fluctuating by millions of miles season to season. It\u2019s always either melting or freezing, and as it melts, its fragments can travel hundreds of miles along waves and currents.<\/p>\n In an article published this month in the journal The Yearbook of Polar Law<\/em>, Tsiouvalas and his co-authors, Mana Tugend and Romain Chuffart, argue that piecemeal updates to current laws simply will never keep up with this fast-changing and threatened environment. Future governance of sea ice will require a transformation of some sort, and they argue that the clearest path forward is to bring the rights-of-nature movement to the high north.<\/p>\n Since Ecuador\u2019s landmark 2008 constitutional protection of nature, Bolivia, India, New Zealand, and other countries across the world have made natural entities legal persons, or otherwise given them inviolable rights. The UCLA Law professor James Salzman, who has taught a class on nature\u2019s rights, told me that this idea does not represent a single legal framework but that it does answer what he calls the \u201cLorax problem\u201d of environmental law, referring to the Dr. Seuss character who claims to \u201cspeak for the trees.\u201d Granting a voiceless entity legal personhood provides it with a representative to argue on its behalf.<\/p>\n With this designation, Tsiouvalas and his co-authors note, sea ice would get the highest legal status possible. In many cases, environmental protections can be bent to accommodate other, conflicting benefits to human society. But personhood grants an inherent right to exist that can\u2019t be superseded. The new paper is mostly an ethical exploration and, the authors acknowledge, still just a stepping stone to more concrete regulations, but granting ice rights would create firmer standing to, for example, keep ships out of areas that humanity might otherwise want to use. The authors also note that rethinking sea ice\u2019s status could include Indigenous people who have been routinely excluded from decisions around Arctic sovereignty and whose millennia of living on and with ice could guide its future governance.<\/p>\n But Sara Olsvig, the chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, told me recently that the legal interest in Arctic rights of nature is a \u201cworrying development.\u201d To Olsvig, the phrase rights of nature<\/em> itself implies some separate concept of nature that doesn\u2019t exist for the Inuit. And in the past, the environmentalist movement has elevated its idea of \u201cnature\u201d above the interests of Indigenous people. Decades-long bans against whale and seal hunting, for instance, devastated the cultural continuity and health of Inuit in the far north.<\/p>\n To answer such concerns, any legal right granted needs to be very clear about the duties that follow, Salzman said: If sea ice has a right to not be harmed, what constitutes \u201charm\u201d? Would that mean blocking all human interference with the ice, or merely banning fuels that emit black carbon? After all, the major threat to sea ice\u2014global emissions\u2014\u201cis not something that can be locally managed,\u201d Salzman pointed out, and so far, natural resources have obtained legal personhood only in a national context. Rights for sea ice would require international agreement, which could be not only harder to achieve but harder to enforce. Sara Ross, an associate law professor at Dalhousie University, in Canada, told me that, in her view, legal personhood granted via international treaty would be too dependent on goodwill agreements to be effective.<\/p>\n But in some ways, legal personhood for nonhumans is an old idea, Ross said. Most countries grant it to corporations, and in the United States and Commonwealth countries, it\u2019s typical for ships too. She especially likes the ship comparison, because\u2014as maritime law has already discovered\u2014floating pieces of ice aren\u2019t so dissimilar. She imagines a more circumscribed role for sea-ice personhood, connected to, say, setting standards that ban icebreaking or heavy fuel emissions in icy areas. If these mandates are violated, local Inuit communities would have the power to sue on behalf of the ice\u2014whether or not they could prove how much one particular ship degraded one particular stretch of ice.<\/p>\n Without some legal protections put in place, the sea ice will soon disappear that much faster. In October, the U.S. bought new icebreaking ships from Finland and undermined an International Maritime Organization agreement that would have had shipowners pay a fee for the greenhouse gases their vessels emit. The next week, just after the conclusion of the Istanbul Bridge\u2019s voyage, Russia and China made a formal agreement to co-develop the Northern Sea Route that the ship had followed. If summer sea ice disappears entirely, scientists predict accelerated catastrophe\u2014leaps in temperature, more frequent and stronger storms, global sea-level rise\u2014which will threaten the planet\u2019s general livability. \u201cThe fact that we need sea ice to survive is not a rights-of-nature argument,\u201d Salzman said. \u201cBut it\u2019s still a pretty good case to make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the Chinese cargo freighter Istanbul Bridge set sail for Europe in late September, it took an unusual route. Instead of heading south for the 40-day voyage through the Suez Canal, it tacked north. The freighter arrived in the United Kingdom at the port of Felixstowe just 20 days later\u2014successfully launching the first-ever Arctic commercial-container<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2466,1307,4098,464,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-39160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-ice","9":"tag-land","10":"tag-laws","11":"tag-sea","12":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}