The Legacy of IPY must be a Circumpolar Arctic Park conserving Biodiversity, Habitats, People, Ecological Processes and Services for Global Sustainability

Falk Huettmann PhD, Assistant Professor
EWHALE lab, Institute of Arctic Biology, Biology & Wildlife Department, University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks AK 99775 USA, Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Phone 907 474 7882

IPY is a massive global research project that wants to provide huge progress, a quantum leap. However, looking at the sophisticated honey comb project scheme showing that all projects are connected, it gets obvious that SUSTAINABILITY and Biodiversity were actually left out in the major structure and its 8 headings (Sustainability and Biodiversity were just given smaller roles in the overall IPY fabric). Instead, the IPY science, initiated by ICSU (International Council for Science) and WMO (World Meteorological Organization), and simply reflecting the value system of the IPY creators, just focuses on all what can be measured (temperature and ice foremost), but not on how we actually achieve Sustainability in the Arctic in real terms. Sustainability is in everybody’s interest, and would allow to use the world’s resources basically infinitely. This concept is hardwired in many Polar policies and global treaties.

IPY follows an outdated, flawed approach to development and science: The entire scientific discipline of Conservation Biology and its lessons are virtually left out in IPY’s main structure, so is the crucial issue of Adaptive Management science. The current IPY scheme is basically written in stone, and cannot get adjusted to latest needs. Further, IPY and its funders largely ignore the idea that science data feed directly into policy, or the sciences investigating the best sustainable decision-making process.

Science is meant to cater the LONG-TERM WEALTH of the global community. Instead, IPY just wants to provide progress by delivering many new and exciting projects and (physical) data to the policy-makers hoping that this information could perhaps be used for making the best possible decisions on our behalf. Judged by the massive species and habitat loss occurring world-wide, this concept must be seen as a failure, so far.

Naively, IPY still caters the old-fashioned notion that development and protection could kindly walk hand in hand, maximizing both. But this concept, widely promoted in the Brundtland Report 1989, heralded by NGOs such as WWF and intensively applied by the World Bank and UNEP, fails globally. There is hardly any development project that does not result into larger habitat and species loss, into social decay, and that is really sustainable. The idea that development would automatically be good and result into jobs and governmental wealth is not only outdated when looking at Climate Change and its costs, but as well when bringing in social and environmental views: Cumulative Impact Assessments (currently not a relevant part of IPY’s main schema) and when internalizing external costs show that clearly. Sacrificing biodiversity and social issues for Economic sake, it might be surprising to most that even our Economy is not doing well with the science schema catered by IPY. A classic example is the management of our oil resources in the Arctic and elsewhere: we are beyond ‘peak oil’. Western-style Arctic Economy usually means subsidies, short-term wealth, and borrowing from elsewhere. None of these crucial questions are part of the IPY scheme.

One must conclude from the above that IPY and its science follows a rather unbalanced and unsustainable concept then; new concepts are apparently not of main interest. Keep in mind that science tends to lead society; the currently widely heralded IPY science scheme provides a wrong message: that ignoring sustainability issues and just focusing on ‘scientific measurements as such’ would be ok.

It’s almost a philosophical question by now what has caused this unbalance, if it was set up on purpose, and by whom? Everything but a subjective, cliquey and strictly hierarchical peer-review system is needed to avoid such situations. It’s clear that IPY ignores environmental issues and how to resolve them efficiently for the wider public and global good. This reflects on the value system of the Arctic countries, of its funding schemes, its research and the related Polar Programs and Academies of Science foremost: Its’ the state-of-the-art of our decision-makers. None of them seem to provide us with a TRUE progress on environmental and societal issues we really need. As most university textbooks on this subject show, in the year 2008 we can do better than that, and we really should.

It must be seen as a tragic oversight from all stakeholders involved that the sophisticated and modern Rio Convention, carrying a truly global mandate and pushing for public online Biodiversity inventory data freely shared with the global community, was not really considered for Arctic Biodiversity in IPY. Although much effort and great progress was achieved with the Data and Information Service (DIS) of IPY, in reality, it is yet not fully supported, enforced and still not funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States and Polar Programs (which had at least two times the opportunity to make it happen and move ahead providing true global leadership), nor is it truly enforced and supported elsewhere (e.g. in Norway, Russia and the EU even). Results of this attitude are obvious: Even scientific publication outlets of the Polar regions itself are not compliant with IPY and its DIS (e.g. promoting free research articles, Open Access and Open Source, globally available to all citizens in transparent formats). Will we loose ourselves in frequent excuses and apologies driven by old-fashioned stubbornness of industrial funders, governments, universities and established scientists ? How to leap in quantum steps then ?

I think that the current IPY will hardly contribute to better Arctic or Polar regions, and a better global village really. It will produce many new and exciting datasets and photos, it will create a Polar ‘data jungle’ with shiny Google Earth applications as its eye-candy, it will create a global hype. This is one way of bringing Polar regions to the attention of the global audience. But due to the mislead focus and missing sustainability structure in IPY, currently it will not help much informing the public or the decision-makers for making best global sustainable decisions. Tragic examples of this situation we experienced already with the Tropical Rainforest wilderness and its biodiversity, which gets lost on a daily basis world-wide.

Hundred years from now, the fate of Arctic biodiversity, and of the Polar Bear as its ‘canary in the coal-mine’, will serve us as a nice indicator on IPY achievements. Arctic seabirds, another traditional component of Arctic offshore waters, are still not inventorized on a circumpolar level even, and thus, we cannot comment on them when looking back in hundred years. Arctic Biodiversity Monitoring is currently not at its best; and it never has been! Such concepts and blunt oversights are putting the environment and sustainability at disadvantage; the lacking support, and in IPY, presents eventually a subsidy for the short-term, harmful development of a rather fragile ecosystem.

Perhaps not obvious to many, the real losers in such a system though will be once more the Third World; almost none of these countries are relevant stakeholders in the Arctic, nor in IPY. This means once more that an opportunity for the equal distribution of global wealth, of fairness and environmental justice was once more left out. Such a situation will further contribute to social unrest and frustration world-wide. The current IPY policy supports a democracy that leaves out Third World citizens, and makes them cynical about Globalization, Democracy and global resources. The Digital Divide will grow further.

In such an environment and situation, with a system fueled by northern countries that support a one-sided democracy as well as economic growth spiraling us down into global bankruptcy, at least we need Arctic control sites as a benchmark for assessing how well we are doing. This concept is actually part of ‘wise and sustainable use’, and well accepted for fully protected sites we admire such as Yellowstone or the Serengeti for instance. Despite an apparent opposite IPY focus, we need studies that allow us to prioritize our actions in the Arctic, and do Strategic Conservation Planning (none of these are currently part of IPY). If IPY wants to be taken seriously by the global community, over centuries to come, and leave a real legacy, it needs to start setting up a sophisticated network of large protected zones. As shown in the Antarctic already, and with its large ecotourism business expressing global admiration for such sites, this is a realistic aim. Other than our own thinking, and mislead governmental advisors, there is nothing what stops us from protecting the entire circumpolar Arctic as one big conservation park. The poles offer the global citizen already free ecological services and huge wealth; a well-thought-out conservation plan can keep this forever. The poles present a global heritage that needs to get managed and considered globally.

We have NOW the chance to improve the Arctic, to improve IPY, to improve the live of Arctic citizens as well as the global village as a whole. Let’s make wise use of it using the best science knowledge we have at hand. Long live IPY.