“We do not give up the North Pole. Canada’s claims to the North Pole are no more than ambition.” So declared Russian polar explorer and scientist Artur Chilingarov on December 11, whom President Vladimir Putin named a “Hero of Russia” after he famously planted his country’s flag on the seabed underneath the North Pole in 2007. […]
Oil and gas. Uranium and rare earth metals. Cod and shrimp. Reindeer and seal pelts. These things constitute the bulk of discussions about Arctic resources, yet there’s one resource that’s overlooked: time. At the Arctic Circle summit in Reykjavik earlier in October, economist and Sami reindeer herder Anders Johansen Eira gave a talk, “The Challenges of […]
In a 15-14 vote, Greenland’s parliament voted to overturn the long-standing ban on uranium mining. The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed in a memo that it supported the decision given that Greenland has maintained control over its mineral resources since 2010. While the decision was close, the lifting of the ban should not come […]
Australia and the Arctic aren’t often mentioned in the same sentence. One tends to hear more about Australia and Antarctica, since the country has an Antarctic Division and carries out scientific research at the icy continent not so far away from Tasmania. But I think that a comparison of Australia and the Arctic, particularly the […]
At the Arctic Frontiers conference, attendees had the opportunity to listen to numerous government and NGO representatives from Russia speak in their own language. If my memory serves me correctly, the Russians were the only ones who spoke in their own language, as the people from the Nordic countries and Asia all spoke in English. […]
Nunavut, Canada is home to a wealth of mineral resources, yet it suffers from a dearth of high-speed internet. New developments in both of those areas could bring big changes to the territory. First, after four years of assessment and analysis, the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB) approved the Mary River iron mine on Baffin Island, in […]
by Nathan William Meyer Twenty-four trillion dollars. It is a number that beggars the imagination, almost 40% of the global economy, and it is buried in one of the world’s poorest and most violent countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Failed state, rape capital of the world, humanitarian catastrophe – the Congo personifies all […]
Mined tin ore from the Eastern DRC Advocates against illegal mining and resource-fuelled conflict gained another small victory with a leading trader of tin on the London Metal Exchange announcing that it is suspending all purchases of tin ore from the Democratic Republic of the Congo until a certification scheme can be put in place […]