New paper on international diplomacy for responsible development in the Arctic
A new paper with authors from Sweden, Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Finland is looking at the importance of healthy ecosystems for human and animal health and the need for diplomacy for responsible development in the Arctic.
Climate change is warming the Arctic at double (in some places, triple) the global rate, and the effects of climate change are already making themselves known. Some changes are obvious, like houses slumping into the sea due to coastal erosion. Heat domes and forest fires are also pretty obvious. But some changes are subtle, like a shift in the migratory route of caribou that takes them away from harvesters in a community, or an increase in the activity and abundance of a mosquito. These subtle changes can have profound effects on food security and transmission of infectious diseases.
One disease that has been the focus of intense study around the circumpolar North is tularemia. This bacteria causes severe, even fatal disease in people, and can be transmitted through water, direct contact with animal reservoirs (rodents and rabbits), and vectors (ticks, flies, mosquitoes). Animals can be exposed, without developing severe disease, or they can be also be affected, including large die-off events.
Overall, we can expect climate change to enhance the abundance and development of vectors and increase the amount of run off, from melting permafrost as well as surface water. This suggests that tularemia will become more of a problem for animal and human health globally. However, climate change is not uniform, and there is often a mismatch in scale between global climate change models and the meaningful level for disease transmission, which is, quite literally, at the microscopic scale. There are many sources of scientific uncertainty, but the biggest uncertainty is people.
What will people around the world decide to do about climate change? Will we pursue a more ecological future? Will we place higher value on sustainable resource extraction? It is these uncertainties that require diplomacy to navigate, the only tool for Arctic peoples and nations to raise their concerns and impact decisions made outside their borders that will deeply and profoundly impact their health and way of life.
The Arctic is a global resource, a sentinel giving an early warning of the changes ahead for a warmer, more interconnected world. This timely paper calls for One Health approaches (which incorporate human, animal, and environmental health perspectives) and global diplomatic approaches to mitigate emerging disease threats in the Arctic. It’s an urgent call to action, since what the rest of the world chooses to do regarding climate change deeply affects the Arctic, and diplomacy is our only tool to influence this.
In good news, this paper highlights mechanisms for participants to voice their concerns at the Arctic Council, including permanent participants who ensure that research is done in the North, for the North. As well, on the science side, models can increasingly deal with uncertainty and regional variation, which will empower northern peoples and countries to make better decisions about the effects of climate change on their unique constellation of health factors.