Building Common Interests in the Arctic Ocean with Global Inclusion

Book excerpt: This book contains an inclusive compilation of perspectives about the Arctic Ocean with contributions that extend from Indigenous residents and early career scientists to Foreign Ministers, involving perspectives across the spectrum of subnational-national-international jurisdictions. The Arctic Ocean is being transformed with global climate warming into a seasonally ice-free sea, creating challenges as well as opportunities that operate short-to-long term, underscoring the necessity to make informed decisions across a continuum of urgencies from security to sustainability time scales. The Arctic Ocean offers a case study with lessons that are especially profound at this moment when humankind is exposed to a pandemic, awakening a common interest in survival across our globally-interconnected civilization unlike any period since the Second World War. This second volume in the Informed Decisionmaking for Sustainability series reveals that building global inclusion involves common interests to address changes effectively “for the benefit of all on Earth across generations.”