The AMAP meetings that took place in San Francisco from 8–12 February 2010 comprised an AMAP strategy workshop and an AMAP Working Group meeting. One of presently six Arctic Council Working Groups, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) was originally established in 1991 to implement parts of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). The primary function of AMAP is to advise the governments of the eight Arctic countries (Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States) on matters relating to threats to the Arctic region from pollution, and associated issues. After 20 years of work, resulting in a series of high quality scientifically based assessments of the pollution status of the Arctic, AMAP now enters a phase of strategic renovation. AMAP has been requested by the Arctic Council to address, in its assessment activities, impacts of environmental and climate changes on the socio-economic conditions and cultures of northern and indigenous communities. Furthermore, AMAP is planning to develop a strong scientific and policy outreach to provide Arctic information at both the national and international levels to better inform environmental, climate, and human health policy and decision-making.
About 60 AMAP experts and observers came to San Francisco to review and evaluate the existing strategy and monitoring programme. Three days of workshop discussions produced key conclusions and recommendations that will guide the preparation of a new mandate for the working group. The strategic theme continued into the following meeting of the AMAP Heads of delegation but a more in practical vein. SWIPA Report, Mercury Assessment, SAON (Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks) and international cooperation were among the agenda items. The SWIPA group (Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic, aka. the Cryosphere Project) presented its layman‘s report in six different language versions: English, Danish, Greenlandic, Chinese, Russian, and French. It also presented a SWIPA film and another film about one of its components, the GRIS (Greenland Ice Sheet) project, as well as a SWIPA pamphlet presenting the main scientific messages to the press and interested public. It was noted that these kind of products were in high demand among educational institutions. However, the secretariat actually does not have the capacity to provide material suitable for educational purposes. The AMAP meeting also saw presentations from two new Ad Hoc Observers, namely China and Japan, that, together with the presentation made by one of the seasoned Observers, the Netherlands, expressed a shared interest in digging into polar research and making plans for future contributions to the work of the Arctic Council.

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At the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Tromsø in April 2009, the chairmanship of the council was passed on from Norway to Denmark. Denmark, at the end of its term in 2011, will in its turn pass the chairmanship on to Sweden that will thus take the suite of Scandinavian Arctic Council Chairs to its completion in 2013. In their common programme, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in 2007 stressed the need for applying an integrated, sustainable, and ecosystem-based approach to the use of Arctic resources, all of which concerns, according to the programme, might be comprised within a holistic perspective. And the needs of Arctic communities and indigenous peoples is clearly seen as falling within a such perspective. The Danish chairmanship, in its own program, likewise evokes a holistic perspective to comprise a complex of concerns about environmental protection, conservation of Arctic flora and fauna, and the preservation of the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and Arctic communities that, the programme states, remains at the core of the work of the Arctic Council. Thus, on the one hand, the Chair recognises the centrality of indigenous peoples' needs and rights, via the category of Permanents Participants, to the idea of the Arctic Council; yet, on the other hand, like in the Danish programme, the council is cautious to speak not only of indigenous peoples, but also of local people, and to speak not only of people(s), but also of communities and residents. Conversely, the indigenous peoples' organisations that are permanents participant in the Arctic Council also cautiously stress that they - as is the case with the Arctic States - are much more than that and that they partake actively in international processes and initiatives in their own right and outside of the auspices of the Arctic Council.
  
Climate change A clear-cut example of this could be seen in connection with COP15 in Copenhagen in December last year. The Arctic Council Chair announced that no consensus could be reached with respect to having the Arctic Council itself apply for accreditation as an observer to the COP15 and, consequently, the Arctic Council would not formally take part in it. At the same time, most of the Arctic indigenous peoples' organisations were already accredited as observers to the UN climate negotiations system. In 2008, the Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples Secretariat (IPS) and the six Permanent Participants organised and took part in a climate change adaptation workshop financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The proceedings from this workshop formed part of the input to the Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change that was held in Anchorage in April, 2009. And, notwithstanding its not especially unified character, the declaration resulting from the Summit formed part of the indigenous peoples' input to the climate negotiations meeting leading up to and to the COP15 itself. Although not being formally a participant, the Arctic Council contributed indirectly to the Copenhagen conference as reports on and films about one of its projects, the "Arctic Cryosphere project - Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic" was featured in a COP15 side event, viz., the "Melting Ice" event organised by Norway, Denmark, and former vice-President of the United States of America, Al Gore. Two permanent participants, the Inuit Circumpolar Council and the Arctic Athabaskan Council, were each granted a side event slot at the COP15 venue, and each of these events was eventually affected by the logistical problems that in different ways marked the course of events in December 2009. Some 40,000 participants and accredited observers had come to Copenhagen for the conference, and as the official venue, the Bella Centre, had a maximum capacity of around 15,000, and with no clear and transparent access regulations in place, with people standing in endless lines outside the venue, waiting in vain to be let in, the often chaotic outcome was in reality predictable. The mood of growing discontent and despair among observers left outside in the cold no doubt mirrored that of most negotiators inside the venue at the official plenary meetings as the conference drew towards its close with only a disappointing and inconclusive Copenhagen Accord to show for itself and the world.

The Arctic and the Globe Just as the stakeholders of the Arctic Council have eagerly sought to bring their concerns to and imprint the global climate negotiations, so an increasing international focus on Arctic issues - spurred by the facts, the threats and new opportunities of climate change - is making itself felt, and applications from non-Arctic states and organisations for observer status at the Arctic Council keep ticking in. The official consensus reached by the Arctic Council is to consider Observers and Observer applicants assets to the work of the council, and that ways should be found to further the Observers' involvement in and contributions to the strivings of the council to promote sustainable development for its member states and for peoples of the Arctic. The Danish chairmanship has stated that, in this process of increasing international interest, increasing importance, and increasing work load of the council, the Permanent Participants category's unique contribution must be safeguarded and strengthened, thereby implying that the growing number and influence of Observers might potentially shift the established and prescribed role of the Permanent Participants within the council. The Permanent Participants, along with the Arctic Council state members, have engaged themselves deeply in the work with assessing applicants as well as in the work with revising criteria for granting Observer status. Thus, the Permanent Participants have objected to applicants that have not adequately stated and described their intentions to work with the Permanents Participants. To sum up, the Permanent Participants seem to be up against challenges related to the globalisation, to the demands for an ever increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of Arctic and global environmental processes, and to the ever increasing need for transcending the Arctic scene and attend various Conferences of Parties, the next of which will be the that of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan, October 2010. The challenge, not least and as seen from an observational, yet deeply engaged stance consists in finding ways to redefine the being and processes of indigenous living in relation to other processes of linking regional, Arctic issues and concerns to the corresponding global ones, in such a way as to avoid the predicament of being exclusively linked to concerns of conservation and preservation of natural diversity, and so as to allow space for operating in terms of cultural, ethnical, and socio-economic developments and concerns and to not have these confused with those of natural science.

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This article will appear as a chapter on the Arctic Council in IWGIA's "The Indigenous World 2010" yearbook

 When Inuit Circumpolar Council, in 2009, released its  “Inuit Circumpolar Declaration on Arctic Sovereignty”, it was not making a statement of secession of an Inuit Nation or something like that. On the contrary, it was critically examining the concept of national sovereignty from the perspective of indigenous peoples right to self-determination, pointing out how, within evolving governance models and federations, sovereignties overlap and get divided “in creative ways to recognize the rights of peoples.”

When using the word sovereignty in their declaration, the ICC was effectively referring to another declaration, the ”Ilulissat Declaration” adopted at the Arctic Ocean Conference, in May 2008 by the five coastal States bordering on the Arctic Ocean, USA, Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark/Greenland.

In the declaration resulting from this Arctic Council breakout session, as it was, the so-called A-5 group of coastal states, firstly, take note of the challenge to ecosystems and to local and indigenous livelihoods as well as the possibilities of natural resource exploitation brought about by Climate change. Secondly, they point out their unique position to address these challenges and possibilities, by ”virtue of their sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in large areas of the Arctic Ocean.”

Notwithstanding the unmistakable element of hands-off signalling, the “Ilulissat Declaration” is scrupulous in emphasising the coastal 5’s commitment to the existing legal and institutional framework with regard to “settlement of possible overlapping claims” and implementation of environmental measures. Reference here is to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and to the Arctic Council. In this way, the declaration expresses the concern of the A-5 to protect not only the Arctic environment but equally to protect the image of the Arctic Ocean as one of international peace and cooperation between the sovereign powers of the region and “other interested parties.”

Among the latter were the remaining three State members of the Arctic Council, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland who, obviously, had to be concerned about their exclusion and about what to them could only mean an undermining of the role of the Arctic Council. The Permanent Participants likewise objected to their exclusion from the 2008 Ilulissat conference, most consistently ICC with their Inuit sovereignty declaration.

The Danish host of the Ilulissat conference carefully underlined that the cooperation initiated by the A-5 group was to be continued and furthered under the auspices of the Arctic Council and that the position and role of the Arctic Council, far from being undermined, was on the contrary going to be strengthened in this manner.

With Canada now calling a new meeting of the A-5 Foreign Ministers scheduled for 29 March 2010, the notion of Arctic cooperation has become no less ambiguous. Sovereignty, ICC reminds in its declaration, is a contested concept with no fixed meaning; what it does, one might perhaps say, is that it points to the constant shifts that, to some and at some point, look like peaceful cooperation, to others look like divide and rule.

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ICC General Assembly

Nuuk, Greenland

http://www.inuit.org/i

2010-06-28 - 2010-07-02

EPPR WG Meeting

Vorkuta, Russia

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2010-06-16 - 2010-06-16