Foreign Policy Blogs

International Polar Year 2012 conference underway in Montreal

International Polar Year 2012 conference underway in Montreal

Ambassador Ronald Jumeau speaking at IPY 2012. (c) Mia Bennett

I’ve just returned from the first day of proceedings at the International Polar Year 2012 conference in Montreal. Entitled “From Knowledge to Action,” the conference features panels, plenaries, action forums, indigenous exchange forums, and poster sessions about the current state of the poles. Reflecting the conference’s title, speakers are emphasizing how to implement the knowledge that scientists and researchers learned during the last IPY, which ran from March 2007 to March 2009. As a start, research and results should be made easily accessible to the public. This has been done with cartographic data on http://map.arcticportal.org, for instance. Working with indigenous peoples to combine their knowledge and experience in the Arctic with scientific observations is another approach that many IPY participants are taking, too.

Finally, polar experts are trying to determine how to communicate the critical nature of climate change and its consequences to the public and politicians, for many see the Arctic and Antarctic as desolate, uninhabited, and above all, disconnected from the rest of the world. But as Ronald Jumeau, the Seychelles’ Roving Ambassador for Climate Change and Small Island Developing States, stressed during his talk, “As the poles melt, we drown.” He added, “Global linkages indeed: if I, a Seychellois islander of the Indian Ocean, feel it important to be with you here to add my few remarks on the global linkages of what climate change is doing to the North and South poles — I could have easily been a Pacific, Atlantic or Caribbean islander — it means these linkages stretch to every corner of the planet.”

The full text of his moving speech is available here, and it pretty much sums up my main takeaway from the conference. The poles may be some of the most remote places on earth, but they’re at the forefront of climate change. Without a doubt, what happens there will first impact the people who live there, but the rest of the world will feel the consequences soon. Ironically, it’s those who are the farthest away from the ends of the earth, in the low-lying islands around the equator, that are most vulnerable.

I’ll be writing more about the talks I attended in the coming days. In the meantime, if you’re not at the conference, you can watch webcasts from IPY 2012 here simply by creating an account.

 

Author

Mia Bennett

Mia Bennett is pursuing a PhD in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her MPhil (with Distinction) in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute, where she was a Gates Scholar.

Mia examines how climate change is reshaping the geopolitics of the Arctic through an investigation of scientific endeavors, transportation and trade networks, governance, and natural resource development. Her masters dissertation investigated the extent of an Asian-Arctic region, focusing on the activities of Korea, China, and Japan in the circumpolar north. Mia's work has appeared in ReNew Canada, Water Canada, FACTA, and Baltic Rim Economies, among other publications.

She speaks French, Swedish, and is learning Russian.

Follow her on Twitter @miageografia