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Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the tough problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (John Holdren): I don’t think we’re going to be able to restore anything like an adequate level of international collaboration on this issue unless we can reverse some of what the Trump administration has done. We need to be back in the Paris Agreement. We need to be full participants in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We need to have our government officials attending the meetings of the Arctic Council, meetings of the Arctic Circle Assembly. We need to have the funding of Arctic issues at NOAA, at NASA, at the EPA, at the National Science Foundation restored. We have seen Trump essentially trying to cripple all of climate science in this country, including polar climate science. They have savaged the staffs at all these agencies–at NSF, at NOAA, at NASA. You know, they fired their chief scientist at NASA, who was a brilliant woman climate scientist. They have fired most of the polar sciences staff at NSF. We can’t get out of this unless we can reverse that.

Intro (Jennifer Spence): What we’re seeing is a global phenomenon. And the approach to Canada and Greenland are excellent examples of that, but you could add Panama to the list too, and at any time you could see another country fall into that category. Ultimately what it means is that the rules-based order and what we understand about how these things function is put in question and there’s a sense of a breaking of trust and a breaking of norms that I think is going to take a long time to recover from. And that’s very present in the Arctic right now. It’s been 25 years of peace and cooperation. I used to joke that, you know, it almost got a little boring to talk about governance in the Arctic. And then we had, COVID was the first shock. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the second shock. And now we have a sort of a complete turn of events in terms of relationships between the US and the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland, and Canada. These are all going to have massive repercussions.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome back to PolicyCast. I’m Ralph Ranalli. It may be one of the most remote places on earth, but what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Melting land ice in Greenland is the single biggest contributor to the sea level rise that is literally drowning Kiribati, a Pacific island nation more than 6000 miles away that is home to 132,000 people. Worsening wildfires in the Canadian Arctic contributed to the rise in emergency room visits for people with respiratory problems in New York and Philadelphia last summer. Harvard Kennedy School Professor John Holdren and Jennifer Spence, the director of the Arctic Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs say the alarm bells ringing in the Arctic on everything from thawing permafrost to economic exploitation to great power rivalry are dire warnings for the rest of the world as well. They say for decades the Arctic has represented the best of humanity—it’s been a model of international cooperation where scientists, policymakers, and indigenous people have set aside national concerns to try to save one of the world’s most vital places. But that cooperation is now endangered by political conflict over Russia’s war on Ukraine and Trump’s attempts to annex Greenland from Denmark, budget cuts to science programs, and by the economic lure of new ocean shipping routes made possible by melting ice and the region’s reserves of rare earth elements. John Holdren is co-director of the Kennedy School’s Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, a theoretical physicist, and director of the White House office of science and technology under President Obama. Jennifer Spence is a former Canadian government official and an expert on the Arctic and sustainable development. They join me today to talk about the unprecedented pressures facing the Arctic, it’s environment and its people, and what that means for the rest of the world.

Ralph Ranalli: John, Jen, welcome to PolicyCast.

John Holdren: Thank you. Good to be here.

Jennifer Spence: Really great to be here. Thanks.

Ralph Ranalli: When the subject of the Arctic comes up, I know what’s on a lot of people’s minds now is the situation with Trump and Greenland, and we will get to that. But first I have to say that learning about the Arctic and the Sub-Arctic and all the issues there, while I was preparing for this conversation, was like going down a rabbit hole in the best possible way. It’s just endlessly fascinating—you dive in and there’s all these incredible scientific and geopolitical and economic and social issues with wide-ranging ramifications. So I was curious about what interested the two of you about the Arctic and how you became involved in studying it. John, what was it for you?  

John Holdren: Well, when I was President Obama’s science advisor, one of my assignments, among many assignments, was to oversee the administration’s work relating to the Arctic. And President Obama made me the chairman, the inaugural chairman, of something called the Arctic Executive Steering Committee, whose responsibility was to get the 25 departments, agencies, and offices in the executive branch that deal with the Arctic to talk to each other, to collaborate, to generate joint programs. And I had been interested in the Arctic casually for a long time. I had first visited the Arctic in 1984, at a Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Kiruna, in Arctic Sweden. I had visited my daughter, who worked as a park ranger in Alaska for a number of years. But it was the experience as Obama’s chair of the Arctic Executive Steering Committee that really got me deeply immersed, deeply fascinated, and when I came back to Harvard at the end of the Obama administration, with a couple of colleagues here we started an Arctic initiative focused on the interaction of rapid climate change in the Arctic with everything else—with politics, with global climate change, with indigenous people’s issues, with infrastructure, with sustainability, and with international interactions on the topic.

Ralph Ranalli: Jen, what about you?

Jennifer Spence: I would say I almost came to it by heading down the rabbit hole that you’re talking about. I came to Arctic issues—I had been working in the Canadian government, I’d been working on resource management issues, conflict with indigenous peoples in the Canadian context. And so I chose to leave the federal government to do a Ph.D., and what I was looking for was issues that were sort of complex, regions that had some innovation, and I gravitated towards the Arctic. You sort of have this confluence of really difficult issues, complex trans-boundary challenges that the region faces, and yet a really interesting environment for governance innovation. And the way that it had sort of formulated itself as this exceptional place for how work was done, as an area of peace and cooperation. All those things attracted me as a place that potentially the world could learn from. I tried a few times to leave the Arctic space, I did some more multinational work in other contexts, and it just kept pulling me back.

Ralph Ranalli: The both of you have mentioned this notion of how the multifaceted challenges of the Arctic ended up fostering this very important collaborative form of governing and bringing different stakeholders together. Can you talk about some of the achievements there that people should know about, things like the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean. That’s definitely a mouthful, but it’s pretty unique in that it is a fishing regulation agreement that was put in place over a fishery that had never been commercially fished yet. Which is pretty extraordinary. It wasn’t a response to some ongoing overfishing problem, but a group of nations saw that the area had the potential to be exploited in a harmful way and decided to act before that happened. Can you give me some examples of that kind of uniquely collaborative work in the Arctic and tell me why that kind of cooperation is important?

Jennifer Spence: It’s interesting, we for sure call it the central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, which isn’t much shorter, but it’s a little easier to say. And I think you’re right. It’s a really fabulous example. It’s sort of the only example we have of the precautionary principle being applied, as you said to a fishery that has not actually happened yet. But it came on the back of a lot of work. So we’re talking 30, 40 years of work that sort of positions the Arctic as a place of peace and cooperation, where the end of the Cold War... it was a place where Russia could reengage on issues of science, on issues of sustainable development, and environmental protection with the seven other Arctic states, which included the United States. So it’s not insignificant to have that be the forum that it was happening in, and to build a partnership. It really is sort of the epitome of science diplomacy from my perspective, that it critically advanced issues that were really important in the region, but built this sense of cooperation, and collaboration. And that sort of built that spirit and it built the norms and values of governance that enabled the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement to come to fruition.

I think the other part that’s really important to highlight here is the role of indigenous peoples. The Saami Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which are two of the six indigenous people’s organizations, really worked hard to champion a place for themselves in that governance. And the result is that the governance norms represented by the Arctic Council, which is one of the institutions in the Arctic, really took on a different kind of credibility and legitimacy to deal with concrete policy issues, because they’d created a place for the people that live in the Arctic to be part of that decision making. And I think that the states’ inclusion of indigenous people in that forum really changed the dynamics and made new things possible.

John Holdren: Yeah. It’s interesting to note that the Arctic Council—this body of eight member states that are the eight countries that have territory or territorial waters in the Arctic—and a number of permanent members, the six Panarctic indigenous organizations, came together and succeeded remarkably in working together across the range of issues that Jen is talking about. But it also spawned a number of other organizations in which political folks, scientists, engineers, businesspeople come together regularly to talk about these issues. So there’s the Arctic Circle Assembly that happens in Reykjavik every October. There’s the Arctic Encounter Symposium that happens in Anchorage, typically every April. And there are many, many more.

When I was in the Obama administration and chairing this Arctic Executive Steering Committee, we organized, together with the State Department, an international conference called the Glacier Conference that was held in Anchorage. And we ended up getting the foreign ministers from 21 countries, plus representatives of all of the Panarctic indigenous organizations to come to Anchorage and meet for several days, focused entirely on climate change and its implications both for the Arctic and the world. And one of the notable things about that meeting—Jen has brought up the importance of engaging indigenous people in these issues—was that when President Obama himself arrived, the first thing he did on arrival from the airport was spend three hours with the indigenous representatives before he even shook the hand of a single foreign minister.  

And leveraging off of that, a year later I organized, in the White House, the first ever meeting of science ministers from around the world with an Arctic focus. We called it the Arctic Science Ministerial. They’re still going. They happen every couple of years, in which science ministers or their deputies for the Arctic get together. It’s just been a domain in which international interaction, international cooperation, and the interdisciplinary focus on how science, economics, politics, policy interact.

Ralph Ranalli: John, you’ve been a scientist your whole life. You’re a physicist. What is it about science? The Arctic has been such a science-centric collaborative environment—so what is it about when you lead with science that leads to this kind of cooperation and gives people the ability to work together where, in other situations, they would not be able to work together.

John Holdren: That’s a great question. The experience that I’ve had in a variety of domains, including not just environmental science, energy technology and policy, international security and arms control, is that if you bring scientists together, they find they have a common basis for a conversation. That is, they have been trained in similar ways. They have been trained to think to at least some degree logically. I mean, scientists are humans too, and they do think emotionally as well as logically. But the fact that they have a common language, and substantially common backgrounds, enables communication to work sometimes when folks with other backgrounds are having more difficulty.

But one of the things that is, that is very nice about it is it’s contagious. That is, you know, I’ve been working with Russians since 1971, starting with an exchange on theoretical plasma physics between a Russian group and I was at the Lawrence Livermore Lab doing theoretical plasma physics at the time. I’ve been working with the Chinese on these issues since 1984. And the degree of communication, the degree of empathy between scientists, as I say, is contagious. And so in all of these engagements I’ve had, they always included not just scientists, but also political figures, social scientists, as well as natural scientists and it’s very effective.

And one of the things that worries me, frankly, about today’s situation, is that the Trump administration has been fracturing these bonds. It has been preventing Americans, whether they’re scientists or political figures, from attending international meetings on these topics. It’s been undermining the support for research on these topics in U.S. universities and national laboratories. And unless we figure out how to reverse this, this process of science diplomacy—engaging a wide array of actors in common cause to address problems that it’s in everyone’s interest to solve—is going to be in big trouble.

Jennifer Spence: If I could just add, I think one of the things that we have to sort of recognize is that we we’re at a place of difficulty. We were at a place of difficulty with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the fundamental differences, that you didn’t see during the Cold War, was the decision to cut relationships and funding to collaborations with Russian scientists. And that’s had huge implications in the Arctic.  

And that is something that, that has happened with a lot of institutions, in a way that hopefully... I mean, we’ve seen some opportunities for that to soften since then. But, again, one of the functions of science diplomacy during difficult times is, when the political leaders can’t speak to each other, you know you still have channels of communication. And that has become increasingly difficult in the current context. And the question becomes trying to find this balance between the huge issues like climate change, where we need to find ways to cooperate, we need common data, we need those issues. And at the same time recognize that you’re not endorsing a particular administration and the actions of a particular administration, that may be a fundamental challenge to cooperation in other levels. And how do you find that balance? There’s no right answer. These are very difficult questions, and yet I believe that a lot of the people that I work with feel that there’s a need to try and make space for both of those at the same time.

John Holdren: Let me just add two points about that. One, the challenge of Russia having isolated itself through their invasion of Ukraine is particularly acute, because Russia owns and occupies about half of the Arctic. And so if you want to study what’s happening in the Arctic, if you want to study what’s happening with wildfires, if you want to study what’s happening with permafrost thaw, if you want to study what’s happening to coastal waters in the Arctic, you have to engage with the Russians.

The second point I want to make is that the Russian scientists who’ve been involved in this work over the years still want to engage. We’ve had ways to be in touch with a fair number of them, and they all recognize what they are losing and what we are losing when that cooperation is fractured.

Ralph Ranalli: The geopolitical attitude of the Trump administration seems to be every country for themselves. Not only America first, but more broadly a kind of antithesis of international cooperation. In his first term, Trump used the Arctic to highlight how Russian and Chinese expansionism needed to be stopped. How surprised were the two of you when Trump 2.0 began and there was this shocking change of policy towards Canada and Greenland and Denmark? Did that catch you by surprise the way it did a lot of other people?

John Holdren: It was shocking. I think many of us were worried about what a Trump administration might do, but I don’t think anybody fully anticipated that the Trump administration would end up alienating Canada, would end up threatening to seize a territory of another NATO member, Denmark. I think people were shocked by this. It makes no sense at all from the standpoint of U.S. interests as we have long understood them, which have been based on alliances, which have been based on cooperation, which have been based on the proposition that sovereign territory is sovereign. And now Trump’s principle seems to be the very old one that the powerful do what they want and the poor sufferer what they must. And it’s a terrible operating principle.

Ralph Ranalli: Jen, I heard you were at a conference in Norway and heard some participants joking that Russia was now the known quantity in the Arctic and America was wild card, because of the very unexpected positions that the Trump administration has taken. In the economic sphere we’re starting to see the effects of the uncertainty related to Trump’s tariffs. What is the fallout of uncertainty in the Arctic based on what Trump has said about annexing Greenland?  

Jennifer Spence: What I would say is what we’re seeing is a global phenomenon. And the approach to Canada and Greenland are excellent examples of that, but you could add Panama to the list too, and at any time you could see another country fall into that category. Ultimately what it means is that the rules-based order and what we understand about how these things function is put in question and there’s a sense of a breaking of trust and a breaking of norms that I think is going to take a long time to recover from.  

And that’s very present in the Arctic right now. It’s been 25 years of peace and cooperation. I used to joke that, you know, it almost got a little boring to talk about governance in the Arctic. And then we had, COVID was the first shock. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the second shock. And now we have a sort of a complete turn of events in terms of relationships between the US and the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland, and Canada. These are all going to have massive repercussions, for multilateral cooperation in the Arctic. The timing is interesting. We will see the transition of the Arctic Council chairship from Norway, which has done a phenomenal job of navigating an extremely difficult situation, to the Kingdom of Denmark, interestingly, in just a few weeks.

Ralph Ranalli: Wow.

Jennifer Spence: The 12th of May. And nobody’s sure what that’s going to involve, but what’s interesting to me is, one of the things that I’ve always found fascinating about Arctic governance is because it’s built based on a lot of soft law and relationships, what we’re going to see is an increasing need to depend on a whole ecosystem of actors in this space to really advance these issues. And what I see is those people are stepping up. As we see failure of productive communication at the higher levels in political realms of the states, I think we’re going to increasingly see innovation in how we advance issues through NGOs, through indigenous peoples organizations, through scientific associations. And you know, I think that that’s incredibly important right now.

Ralph Ranalli: I think you could make the case that one of the reasons why this sort of collaborative governance was possible in the Arctic, was because the Arctic wasn’t seen as a place you could exploit for resources. But now it seems like there’s a chance for economic exploitation, and for example our friend Professor Henry Lee says he thinks Trump’s actions are at least in part about improving the U.S. bargaining position on mining rights, particularly rare earth elements. John, what do you think of that theory?

John Holdren: Well, I think it is a factor, but disentangling what Trump’s motivations might be is a fool’s errand, if I may say so. It’s undoubtedly partly that, but who knows whether that’s simply his argument to attract corporate support or whether it’s really important to him? I think one of the things that’s important to Trump, he wants to become the first president in a very long time to expand US territory. He thinks he’ll get on Mount Rushmore if he can take Greenland and make Canada a 51st state.

But the other thing Trump seems to want is simply to have the power to do whatever he wants. And he’s been knocking down guardrails. He’s been knocking down obstacles to his uninhibited exercise of power in practically every domain he can think of. And so it’s hard to interpret what he’s doing to science in the United States, and worldwide as well, without concluding that he’s simply against science, against universities, because he’s against facts. He’s against use of analysis in decision-making. He’s against independent opinion. That’s why he’s going after not just the media, he’s going after libraries and museums. He’s not just going after the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda, he’s going after the climate change agenda, the toxic substances agenda, every aspect of environment—he’s going after windmills, for heaven’s sakes. And again, it’s hard to see that as anything but a violent reaction against everybody who’s had the temerity to disagree with him about anything.

Ralph Ranalli: Turning away from Trump, how much are either of you concerned about what seem to be a couple of relatively new ways that the Arctic can be economically exploited? First you have rare earth elements. Greenland is ranked eighth on the list of countries in the world with the largest reserves of rare earth metals, which are vital to the manufacturing of everything from mobile phones to EV batteries to medical devices. I think Greenland’s rare earth elements reserves are estimated at 1.5 million metric tons, which is just behind the United States, which has an estimated 1.7 million metric tons. So grabbing Greenland would effectively double the U.S. reserves. China, meanwhile, has the world’s largest reserves, something like 44 million metric tons, so you have the competitive pressure there. Then beyond rare earth elements you also have the potential for the opening of new shipping lanes through the Arctic, including one that’s controlled by Russia, another one called the Northern Sea Route that’s favored by China since it can cut the voyage from China to Europe from 48 days to 33 day. How much can increasing commercialization of the Arctic do to accelerate the deterioration of the environment in the region?

John Holdren: I think it is a big concern. And at the same time you have to temper it a bit, because the economics of exploiting rare earths in the Arctic are not currently favorable. Basically nobody’s, nobody’s doing it effectively and economically today. And the idea that there’s this bonanza there waiting to be plucked is simply going to lead to disappointment of the investors. It’s just a very difficult environment. And rare earths are difficult anywhere. But in the Arctic, particularly so. And similarly, oil and gas…. there are some folks who think there’s more oil and gas under the Arctic than anywhere else in the world, but the oil companies aren’t interested. They haven’t taken up the opportunities to do more leasing in the Arctic that have been offered because they can’t make money at it at anything like the current price of oil. They’d have trouble making money at it at twice the current price of oil. And so while there is a danger of willy-nilly development that messes up various parts of the Arctic in serious ways, I think the notion that the Arctic is this bonanza that is going to be completely transformed by industrial operations is a bit of an illusion.

Ralph Ranalli: Jenn, what’s your concern about commercial exploitation?

Jennifer Spence: Well, I think first of all, what’s fascinating to me is, one of the reasons I’ve taken so many interviews on Greenland is because it’s like suddenly the media just discovered Greenland and discovered the Arctic. And part of what worries me is the quality of the information that we have about the Arctic. This has been a trend over time, that there’s this recognition, and this tension between the Arctic as sort of a last frontier for economic development. I mean, there’s definitely that sort of idea of shipping, oil and gas, the prospect of new spaces to enter. But it’s always been intention with this idea that the Arctic is also the bellwether when it comes to climate change. And how we manage climate change in the Arctic context, is not insignificant, and the environment in the Arctic and its role in climate change. And so, that tension has been there for some time.

But what’s happening now is suddenly this the-sky-is-falling kind of narrative, which does not add up—as John’s sort of referencing—does not add up to the reality of the situation. And that’s what’s concerning to me right now is there’s a sort of action-without-thought kind of approach, and we know there are massive infrastructure deficits in the Arctic, that this is still going to be an extremely difficult place to operate irrespective of this opening of the Arctic Ocean. This is not a future of places that are going to be easy to access. And so, a more tempered and thoughtful analysis of timeframes and probabilities is really warranted to really appreciate the significance of this for any country. And I don’t think we do ourselves any service by feeding that narrative and not nuancing it.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I was reading some articles on this topic—I think it was in The Economist—and I was really struck by how boosterish they were about the economic possibilities, while being completely devoid of any context about the environmental degradation that might result. It was almost a little ghoulish, frankly, and concerning. I would love to talk about some of the climate science issues now. There are so many climate issues involving the changes that are happening in the Arctic due to man-made planetary warming, and the Arctic has been long thought of as a bellwether for climate-related emergencies ahead. What are some of the issues that concern you the most, John? Is it loss of sea ice? Loss of land ice? Permafrost thaw? Wildfires?

John Holdren: The answer is all of the above. And it starts with the fact that the temperature is rising three to four times faster in the Arctic than the global average. So the Arctic is really the cutting edge. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It’s telling us the kinds of challenges that the whole world is going to face as global heating continues. But if you ask: “What specifically is it doing?” It’s having enormous effects in the Arctic. For example, the loss of sea ice, which is floating ice. So its disappearance doesn’t increase sea level, but it drastically changes the energy balance of the whole Arctic. It changes the breeding and feeding opportunities for a large fraction of the marine organisms in the Arctic, many of which are very important for the subsistence of indigenous people. Some of them are important commercially. But it is also a great example of the proposition that what’s happening in the Arctic isn’t staying in the Arctic because the disappearance of the heat ice so changes the energy balance of the earth, that not only is it accelerating warming overall because it’s happening so fast up there, but it’s affecting atmospheric circulation and ocean currents all over the Northern hemisphere. Many of those changes are not to the benefit of the people who live in the Northern Hemisphere. And then you look at the melting of the glaciers and the ice sheet, particularly the Greenland ice sheet, and they are now the single largest contribution to sea level rise. And sea level rise, of course, is a global phenomenon that has impacts everywhere.

Then you look at the question of wildfires. The area covered by wildfires across the Arctic is increasing rapidly. It’s more than doubled in the last 20-some years. It’s expected to double again in the next 20 or 25. And those wildfires are bigger. They’re hotter, they’re producing larger volumes of toxic smoke. That toxic smoke is not only a huge problem in the Arctic itself, it’s propagating south into the mid latitudes. We’ve had days in Philadelphia and New York where the air quality was worse than that in Delhi, in India, which is ordinarily the world’s yardstick for the worst place in terms of air quality. And that’s being driven, was driven, by wildfires in Canada from which the smoke was propagating, southward.  

The permafrost thaw is an enormous problem for the people who live there. It causes buildings to collapse, it causes roads to collapse, damages industrial infrastructure. Even in the traditional communities, the indigenous communities, the walkways across the tundra are no longer usable. The sewage pipes are breaking because of permafrost thaw. In many communities, refrigeration has been in the permafrost, so the refrigerators are gone as the permafrost thaws. But it is also a potential problem for the planet, because as permafrost thaws, the contained organic carbon is exposed to bacterial decomposition and you get emissions of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. Those are globally mixed gases. The atmosphere doesn’t care where it came from and when it comes from warming arctic permafrost, it is a potential big bite out of what is often called the carbon budget, that is, the carbon budget of society, how much carbon can we release from our direct activities before we exceed whatever our target is—two degrees, two-and-a-half degrees, whatever. It becomes harder if large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane are coming out of a thawing permafrost.

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. We’ve talked to our colleague Rob Stavins about his work on methane. Of course carbon is very concerning over the long term, but methane is even more of an issue in the short term because of the speed at which it accelerates warming And I think also with permafrost, don’t you have the possibility of sort of long dormant pathogens...

John Holdren: Yes.

Ralph Ranalli: Also being released? And coming on the heels of COVID and with everyone staring down the barrel of avian flu, that’s got to be a concern.

John Holdren: Anthrax has already been experienced in parts of the Arctic because of permafrost thaw. Mercury emissions—it turns out for reasons that are quite intricate scientifically, there’s an enormous amount of mercury that’s built up in arctic soils and it’s coming out. Industrial wastes in the Arctic were often just left in frozen condition thinking: “Well, it’s going to be frozen forever. It’s okay.” Those industrial wastes are coming out, so it’s a big health problem.

You know, the health challenges in the Arctic are already large. One of the members of our working group here in the Arctic Initiative is a Mass General Hospital/Harvard Medical School physician who has developed the wilderness medicine programs at those institutions, and he runs an effort to try to address health challenges in indigenous coastal villages in Alaska. And what he and his colleagues are finding doing that is the already big health challenges of delivering medical care in these remote communities are now being magnified by permafrost thaw.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, we’ve mentioned the indigenous peoples of the Arctic a few times already, but can we really turn our focus to them? There are about 4 million people who live in the Arctic, of which about 400,000 are indigenous. What do most people not know about indigenous people of the Arctic that you think they should know?

Jennifer Spence: Well, I think one of the things to clarify in terms of the population distribution is there aren’t very many big cities in the Arctic. The largest cities are actually in the Russian Arctic. And there’s a lot of small remote communities and a lot of them in previous years would’ve been nomadic. This is what I mean about it filtering into the norms and values of the governances—a very strong connection to the land and environments in which they live. And they have done a huge amount of international advocacy work, trying to elevate people’s understanding not only of the cultures and the livelihoods of the people of the Arctic, which are very much connected to the land, but also trying to elevate the contrast between the values that they hold in terms of their interaction with the lands and what that means for policymaking relative to what we see coming in with a growing interest in mining and development that may be quite counter and maybe undermines their opportunity to live in these places that they’ve lived for thousands of years.

And I think that they have done an incredible job. I would argue that the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, who also have been quite active in the UN system, have been incredibly powerful messengers of climate change, both within the region but also internationally, because they can articulate the stories of what it means to live with climate change and really put a face to an experience. To what that really means. Which I think is one of the challenges we face in climate change communications, that it’s so remote. And these are people that are living it every day and are on the front lines of adapting to what we can all expect and experience in the future.

Ralph Ranalli: And because they’ve been living there for thousands of years, they also have a unique knowledge and appreciation of the environment and of the climate. I read, the Gwich’in Council, they’ve been leading efforts to revitalize their traditional community firefighting practices. For example one of the things they do is set controlled fires during the spring thaw to limit excess plant growth that might feed large wildfires later. And by setting them during the spring thaw, the snow is gone but the ground is still frozen so the plant roots survive. Can you talk about the importance of indigenous knowledge for issues like wildfires?

Jennifer Spence: Yeah. So actually that’s a colleague of ours who’s been leading that. His name’s Edward Alexander. And it’s been an initiative through the Arctic Council, but it’s been going on for quite some time. And what’s interesting about this is that the  Gwich’in, but also many of the other indigenous peoples, have been arguing for attention to be paid to the impact of wildfire in the Arctic and the increasing number of wildfires for decades. And no one was listening. And so this is quite a good example of what it would’ve meant if we had listened to that knowledge and that perspective more quickly. But what we’re now seeing is this effort to revitalize some of the techniques for how you might manage fires in the Arctic. And acknowledging that there are existing techniques and that maybe some of the techniques that we have been applying for fire management in the Arctic have not been very effective. So, it’s sort of an interesting confluence of knowledge of place. Which is what indigenous knowledge always offers is a very, very deep knowledge and understanding of the ecosystems that, that they live in.

John Holdren: And that’s leading to a general and more widespread interest in how we incorporate indigenous knowledge into the thinking of so-called Western knowledge about what is going on. It’s challenging. But I think there has been substantial progress in that domain, and there’s going to be more, because what the indigenous peoples know about the Arctic—they’ve been living there for more than 10,000 years—t’s indispensable knowledge if we really want to figure out what’s happening there and how best to deal with it.

I would add also that Jen’s point about the indigenous people being able to tell stories is absolutely crucial. And one of the dimensions of that is so many of the stories are heartbreaking that they really capture people’s attention. We have on our international council of the Arctic Initiative here at the Kennedy School, we have an international council of six individuals of whom three are indigenous. We have a Gwich’in leader, an Inuit leader, and a Sámi leader. And the stories they are telling about what is happening in their communities are heartbreaking. Great example, our Gwich’in member grew up in a village of 30 people on the banks of the Yukon River, in which about two thirds of the subsistence was from king salmon and chum salmon. And those runs have now disappeared essentially from the Yukon. And he is heartbroken that his children can’t have the experience of a subsistence and a culture built around these fish, which have simply now disappeared. It’s heartbreaking.

Ralph Ranalli: So we’ve reached the point where we need to talk about policy and policy solutions. First, I think we need to figure out exaclty where a policy solution or some policy advancements to make things better would take place. Does that happen at the UN level? At the international level? It doesn’t appear to be happening at the level of the Arctic Council right now, or certainly not at the level of U.S. politics. So where is there a potential path for progress? Is it a new international treaty?

John Holdren: Well, let me take an initial shot. I don’t think we’re going to be able to restore anything like an adequate level of international collaboration on this issue unless we can reverse some of what the Trump administration has done. We need to be back in the Paris Agreement. We need to be full participants in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We need to have our government officials attending the meetings of the Arctic Council, meetings of the Arctic Circle Assembly. We need to have the funding of Arctic issues at NOAA, at NASA, at the EPA, at the National Science Foundation restored. We have seen Trump essentially trying to cripple all of climate science in this country, including polar climate science. They have savaged the staffs at all these agencies–at NSF, at NOAA, at NASA. You know, they fired their chief scientist at NASA, who was a brilliant woman climate scientist. They have fired most of the polar sciences staff at NSF. We can’t get out of this unless we can reverse that.

Jennifer Spence: I will take a slightly different angle on it, which is I think at the working level in the Arctic Council that work is still progressing. And in fact, I think that we are seeing focus on the work and focus on the science and the relationships and maintaining the relationships. And I think that that is moving forward. And I think that the Kingdom of Denmark, in their role as the chair of the next Arctic Council, has really demonstrated a commitment. They haven’t pulled their punches. One of their priorities is climate change and so it is through those multilateral mechanisms that we can still see that happen.

I also think that in this context, where states are struggling, that it is actually through the indigenous people’s organizations that work at the Arctic Council that we have the opportunity to elevate and sustain some of the policy issues that are important to the Arctic and really empower them. In a time when we see increasing interest from non-Arctic actors, it behooves us to really try and get down and keep this working and recognize that while states are important actors, that there are many other people that can advance important policy issues and that the governance institutions in the Arctic have always depended on a broader ecosystem of institutions. And so continuing to feed into those and contribute to those is incredibly important.

John Holdren: And I have to say, I agree with all of that. And I think what is going to be important in terms of U.S. participation is that the philanthropic community has to continue to step up. The philanthropic community has already been a major funder of activities related to the Arctic, and in light of what the Trump administration has been doing, we’re going to need even more help from that community, and I think we’ll get it. But the liability is that the foundations don’t actually have enough money to replace all of the important things that the federal government is abandoning. So while they will help for sure, we’re still going to continue to need to work on reversing some of the more damaging things that the Trump administration has been doing.

Ralph Ranalli: So, say, for the sake of the argument, that there was a new collaborative spirit among the members of the Arctic Council other than the U.S. and Russia—namely Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, and enthusiastic support from and non-Arctic states and important non-government actors. If you had their ear, what high-priority policy recommendations would you have for them to do some positive things for the Arctic.

Jennifer Spence: I think one of the ones that I sort of repeat regularly is that all of these things depend on each individual Arctic State investing in their own expertise. So we can sort of throw stones at a glass house and say, well, the US is withdrawn from this and so we should all talk about how incredibly difficult that is. Or we can acknowledge that now is the time to step up and fill that space, and the best way to do that is to support the experts, knowledge holders and institutions within your own country, to actually continue to do the good work that needs to happen. I mean, we’ve talked a good line, but if I’m honest, there’s still way more that each of these individual countries could do.

And the second is to continue the dialogue. And what I would emphasize here is, the way the Arctic Council works is right now Russia still is at the table at the working level. And there should be a place left open for the U.S. experts and officials to be there too. To maintain the lines of communication. To allow the work to advance. And to prioritize things that people can get on board with. And we’ve seen those examples. We’ve seen that wildfires is one that everybody can agree on. I’ve always said search and rescue and emergency management- those are things that people can ultimately say: “Yes, that makes sense.” But we also need data, and so also ensuring that we’re doing the best that we can in an extremely difficult situation to continue to collect data and share data.

Ralph Ranalli: John, if we had this international cooperation, what would you ask them to prioritize?

John Holdren: Well, I would ask them to prioritize Arctic Ocean Management, is one issue. Another is to prioritize the science of understanding what’s coming out of the permafrost thaw. I would ask them to support jointly work on the mechanics of Greenland thaw, which is again, driving global sea level rise. I would ask them to focus on the management of Arctic travel routes as part of the management of the ocean.

And I would also ask that we recognize that countries outside of the Arctic have interests in the Arctic. I mean, we cannot say China has no business there. The Chinese climate envoy spoke at the last meeting of the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik. And he took questions. And one of the questions from the floor was: What business does China have in the Arctic? And he had a very good answer. He said, first of all, the Arctic sea route is of immense potential economic importance to China. And number two, climate change in the Arctic is affecting the climate in China for the worse. And we therefore have a perfect right to participate in the science of understanding climate change in the Arctic and what it’s doing. I think it was a powerful answer. And we will get nowhere if we try to insist that countries that don’t have territory or territorial waters in the Arctic have no business engaging on Arctic issues.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, this has been a really fascinating and eye-opening conversation. I’d like to thank you personally and on behalf of our listeners, because I think you’ve opened their eyes a bit too. So thank you so much for being here.

John Holdren: Well, thank you for having us.

Jennifer Spence: Yeah, thanks very much.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. Please stay tuned to for more upcoming episodes, including a special Kennedy School Commencement episode with renowned journalist Christiane Amanpour. And there’s more to come after that, because for the first time, PolicyCast will be airing new episodes all summer rather than take our usual break. There are simply too many important policy issues that will affect you and the people around you these days for the us to take the summer off. That not only means more important and engaging discussions for you to enjoy, that also that it’s more important than ever that you follow PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And please leave us a review and while you’re there. So, until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.