LibGuides: CoR Plenary (June 2022): The new EU Arctic strategy

The new EU Arctic strategy

The European Union and the Arctic by Nengye Liu; Elizabeth A. Kirk; Tore Henriksen (Eds.)
Publication Date: 2017-10-05

The European Union and the Arctic brings together academics from a range of disciplines to discuss the EU's potential roles in shaping Arctic governance. The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the EU's current Arctic policy framework. The second part focuses on the EU's engagement with Arctic governance at the regional level and encompasses the EU's engagement with the so-called Arctic Five (five coastal States of the Arctic Ocean), providing examples of some of those relationships. The third part takes a sectoral approach, analysing the EU's potential contribution to regulation of key human activities in the Arctic, including shipping, fisheries, oil and gas operations, and marine mammals.

EU regional policy in the Arctic
Local communities in the Arctic face a unique set of challenges, including remoteness, depopulation and a severe climate and topography. EU regional policy can support development in the European Arctic through investments under the European structural and investment funds, delivered through regional development and European territorial cooperation programmes, with further support also available in the form of a special aid allocation for northern sparsely populated regions. Structural funds represent an important source of funding for regional development in the European Arctic and have helped regenerate the regional economy and create jobs through the development of new activities such as high-tech innovation and tourism. Numerous challenges remain, however, with critics pointing to a limited focus on transport infrastructure, weak complementarity between EU funds in the region and problems in terms of participation, with small organisations often lacking the necessary know-how or resources. Taken together with the region's growing strategic importance and the continued need to tackle climate change, this has led to increased efforts to formulate a policy outlining the EU's approach towards the Arctic.

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EP Briefing - June 2022
The Arctic: Opportunities, concerns and security challenges
Global warming and growing interest in the Arctic's economic potential are bringing changes for the region's 4 million people. The EU's 2016 Arctic policy, prioritising sustainability, economic development and international cooperation, is being revised to reflect these developments. The Foreign Affairs Committee report, on the October I session agenda, notes some of the environmental and security concerns, including the risk of geopolitical tensions.

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EP - At a glance - Sept 2021
New EU fisheries agreement with Greenland
The EU-Greenland Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA) is a key component of EU fisheries relations in the North Atlantic. It allows EU vessels to fish in the waters of Greenland and has a pivotal role in the quota-exchange network in the region, as the EU swaps a significant part of its fishing opportunities in Greenlandic waters with Norway and the Faroe Islands for fishing quotas in their waters. Parliament's vote on giving its consent to the conclusion of a new agreement and protocol is scheduled for the October I part-session.

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EP - At a glance - Sept 2021
EU climate action in ocean governance and fisheries policy
Marine resources are a vital and growing source of food for human consumption, while oceans also play an important role in climate regulation. Scientific evidence shows that the climate system has changed rapidly in recent decades, with the oceans greatly mitigating the effects of climate change by absorbing excess heat and human-made carbon emissions. The velocity of the effects of climate change leaves little room for adaptation, causing both declines in abundance and geographic shifts in fish populations. As a result, people who rely heavily on seafood and fisheries for their livelihoods run the risk of income loss and food insecurity. The European Green Deal places climate action at the heart of a wide range of new legislative and non-legislative initiatives and includes ambitious goals such as achieving climate-neutrality by 2050 and preserving and protecting biodiversity. The new 'farm to fork' strategy addresses the challenges of sustainability in the food supply chain and, in the area of seafood, highlights the imminent update of the strategic guidelines on aquaculture, the goal to support the algae industry and the focus on climate change in the 2022 common fisheries policy review.

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EP Briefing - April 2021
Walking on thin ice: A balanced arctic strategy for the EU
A remote frontier for thousands of years, the Arctic is rapidly gaining international attention. Global warming is causing the Central Arctic Ocean’s ice to melt at an unprecedented rate, threatening crucial ecosystems and biodiversity in the wider Arctic region. As a result, global sea levels are rising, with potentially cataclysmic global social, economic and environmental consequences over the long term, irreversible on a timescale relevant to human societies. Somewhat paradoxically, these climatic changes are also opening new opportunities for resource extraction and transport, resulting in increased economic – and military – activity in the region, both from the Arctic Circle countries – most prominently Russia – and new players such as China. With three EU Member States – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – and some half a million EU citizens situated in the Arctic, the EU has a natural and important role to play in the region. And, as the Arctic becomes a focal point of economic and geopolitical competition, and is increasingly recognised as being central to human and planetary survival, the EU must step up its engagement with Arctic states and other stakeholders. Never has ensuring a peaceful and sustainable Arctic been so important.

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EC publication - July 2019
The EU in the Arctic
The European Union has an important role to play in supporting successful Arctic cooperation and helping to meet the challenges now facing the region.

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EEAS website
Our common arctic? A more sustainable EU-arctic nexus in light of the European green deal
The European Union is a unique stakeholder in Arctic affairs. The EU is linked to the Arctic, affecting and affected by regional changes and developments, resulting in a multidimensional nexus of influences, impacts and overlapping agendas and stakeholders. As a global multi-level force and a major promoter of the concept of sustainable development the EU can also be a leader in setting standards for a more sustainable interaction between a major economy and the Arctic region. On the premise that the path towards a more comprehensive and integrated EU Arctic policy should focus on implementing more robust environmental policies in Europe, this paper argues that developing a distinct EU Arctic policy should only be regarded as secondary to building a – predominantly internal – regulatory framework that considers the ongoing changes in the Arctic. This article analyses the EU’s capacity to be a global regulator and to set internal environmental standards with external influence on the Arctic. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the extent to which EU environmental policies and legislations can be regarded as contributing to the promotion of sustainable development in the Arctic with an analyses of the EU’s energy-climate policy complex.

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The Polar Journal, Volume 11, 2021

What about the Arctic? The European Union’s Geopolitical Quest for Northern Space
Over the last decade(s), the European Union has established itself as geopolitical actor seeking to actively engage in the spatial ordering of its neighbourhoods. In order to better understand the existing geopolitical nature of the EU, this article addresses the question of the EU’s decade-long endeavour to construct legitimacy in its Northern Neighbourhood; an area often neglected in discussions about the EU’s geopolitical role. By examining its Arctic involvement between 2008 and 2018, this article enquires into the EU’s broader role as an international actor with an evolving geopolitical identity. Over the last decades, the EU has exhibited geopolitical ambitions alongside its own conceptualisation of world order, rule of law and good governance. This article establishes a clearer picture on how the EU as an amalgamation of its various institutions has tried to impose these geopolitical ambitions on a neighbouring region that itself experiences a manifold change in the early twentieth-first century. It gets to the conceptual bottom of what exactly fashioned the European Union with geopolitical agency in the Arctic region – internally and externally. The article is based on a decade of research on the EU as an emerging Arctic actor.

Andreas Raspotnik and Andreas Østhagen, Geopolitics, published on 06/10/2019