Lord Teverson
Main Page: Lord Teverson (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Arctic Committee Report
Lord Teverson Excerpts
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, we are the Arctic’s nearest state, other than the eight members of the Arctic Council—I will talk about that organisation later. In fact, Out Stack in Shetland is only 320 miles from the Arctic Circle. The committee sees this report as a wake-up call not just for Parliament but, in particular, for the Government about the United Kingdom’s role in the Arctic and our policies towards it.
I assure noble Lords that your colleagues spent some time up in the Arctic Circle. We were very pleased to visit Svalbard, which is only 800 miles from the North Pole. Your Lordships will be pleased to know that it was in September and it was not too cold at the time. We managed to avoid the attentions of the wildlife in Spitsbergen, I am particularly delighted to say. It was insisted on that we were accompanied by armed guards while we were out on field studies there. In fact, the university there offered what were known as welfare rifles, in case we should come across some of the native fauna. Perhaps that is a phrase that the rifle association in America could use.
I was also very privileged to join a parliamentary delegation of the Arctic Council in the Yukon, on behalf of the Lord Speaker. That was a lesson to us about the Arctic as a whole. Its size is immense: Arctic Russia is the largest area belonging to a nation state in the Arctic, but the Yukon is only one—in fact, it is the smallest—of three Canadian provinces in the far north. Its size is twice that of the United Kingdom, but its population is pretty well the same as that of my nearest town, St Austell in Cornwall: 37,000 people, of whom 28,000 live in the one city of Whitehorse, where the conference was held. It is an immense place and one that is very empty. Altogether in the Arctic there are about 4 million inhabitants, most of them in the Russian Federation, and half a million of them are indigenous tribes and populations—First Nation Indian, including all the different ethnic groups that there are around the Arctic.
The big issue in the Arctic and why that wake-up call is important is of course that of a changing climate. The committee did not get into why the climate is changing—we did not see that as part of our remit; it was perhaps rather too contentious a subject—but what is true is that the climate is changing. The average temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees centrigrade since the period 1961 to 1990, and the climate is warming at something like double the rate of temperate areas such as ours. Sea ice has halved over the past two decades in terms of area, but in terms of volume it has decreased by 75%. That difference is because, when the sea ice re-forms and is just one-year sea ice, it is much thinner, so that whole area is changing. Noble Lords will understand that melting water from the ice cap itself does not affect ocean volumes or depths, or rising sea levels; they cancel each other out. But should the Greenland ice shelf melt, we will have a sea rise of some 7 metres, or 23 feet. So again this is an important area for the United Kingdom; whatever happens in the Arctic affects the United Kingdom directly.
The governance of the Arctic is in many ways in some of the safest hands there are globally. The Arctic Council is made up of eight member states, three of them not with boundaries on the Arctic Sea and five with boundaries. The council was formed in 1996 and has grown in that time in authority and organisation, getting a secretariat that works between meetings. While we were undertaking our study, the Canadians held the chairmanship of the Arctic Council and that is now the role of the United States. We welcome very much the fact that in the Arctic region there is the rule of law, not just through the Arctic Council but through other conventions—particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—and those are areas of law by which all those nations around it abide. All the very high-profile claims on land and sea in the Arctic are based on the international convention. We welcome that very much.
The Arctic Council itself, of which the United Kingdom is one of the original observer states, is changing. We welcome one of the changes, in that it is starting to have enforceable conventions itself—one on oil spills, and another on search and rescue—showing strength of agreement and working between nations. But the other area of change is that the number of observer states is increasing greatly, so the United Kingdom is a smaller part of the whole. What is particularly interesting is who the new observer states are; they are India, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Italy. The point is that the Asian states, the big growth states of the world, are taking an increasingly important interest and involvement in the Arctic, and we should make sure that we are not marginalised.
The committee believes that we also have an important role as a country in terms of the indigenous people, in that perhaps a by-product of the increase in observer states is the fact that the permanent representatives to the Arctic Council from each of the indigenous peoples have been marginalised in their influence. Can the UK take a role in making sure that indigenous peoples and their permanent representatives on the Arctic Council continue and increase their role in decision-making? We were particularly concerned that certain groups, primarily those from the Russian Federation, often found it very difficult to get to Arctic Council meetings, partly because of distance and communications but also because of a lack of finance. We would like to think that the UK could help in that area as well.
On the subject of Russia, two major things happened while our Select Committee was taking evidence. One of those was the Russian occupation and annexation of Crimea, and the other was the big fall in oil prices. The Crimea situation clearly changed many of the relationships among the nations of the Arctic Council. Canada took quite an aggressive stance on that move—rightly, to my mind—but it meant that some aspects of Arctic Council business became a little more difficult. However, one key thing that we say in the report is that, despite the issues around the international legality of certain actions of the Russian Federation, we must make sure as an international community that we can isolate to some degree the co-operation on science and search and rescue, as well as other areas, that take place in the Arctic area.
Our knowledge of the Arctic is severely wanting. We did not manage to get to the research station in Spitsbergen because the weather was inclement, but we had a videoconference. A large amount of research, which is reasonably co-ordinated, is taking place there, but that does not mean that we fully understand the Arctic, its ecosystems, its environment and its future. In fact, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. Therefore, one of the main areas we concentrated our report on was increased scientific research. I very much welcome the Government’s response in terms of scientific programmes to ensure that we play a bigger role in that area. We do not understand the ecology of the sea there, we do not understand the effects of permafrost, in particular, and we do not understand the risks of fisheries as the Arctic becomes more commercially exploitable. That is why we suggest very strongly that there should be a moratorium on fisheries until we understand that area of the ecosystem far better.
In terms of the environment and commercial exploitation, there is not going to be a scramble for the Arctic immediately. The costs, the distances, the remoteness and the ice still mean that commercial exploitation and use of the region is a little way off, but it is starting. This gives us an opportunity to manage that exploitation and to get the conventions into place now. That is the priority, and it is one on which the United Kingdom can help. For shipping, the north-west passage will not be the motorway of the north for many years. However, the lack of hydrographic mapping of all those areas means the risks of oil spills and search and rescue needs are high. Shell has this year withdrawn from exploring in Arctic waters, which gives us a gap and gives the international community an opportunity to lay down strong rules around oil exploration, particularly that there should be no exploration where there is sea ice. We believe that a moratorium on fisheries is important.
What about the UK’s role? We believe very strongly that the UK should keep the leading role it has had historically, but it will be displaced by other parts of the world, particularly Asian nations and the Arctic states, if we do not ensure that we are a major player within the Arctic Council. I am pleased that the Government have said that they will make sure they always have representation at political meetings of the Arctic Council. Will the Minister say at what level that representation will be?
We feel most of all that, like France, Poland, Singapore and many other countries, the UK should have an ambassador for the Arctic—not someone with a desk and a satellite phone at the North Pole, but someone with a scientific and diplomatic background who can co-ordinate the various areas in which Britain should be involved and in which it should be seen as a major player. The Government’s response said that they believe the UK’s Arctic policy is right and that it is,
“based on respect; cooperation; and leadership”.
I completely agree with those three words, but I would like them to become “leadership, respect and co-operation”. I beg to move.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. When I spoke earlier, I did not declare an interest as a board member of the Marine Management Organisation. I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, not least those who were not on the committee—the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and the noble Lord, Lord Greenway. I did not think anybody would manage to get the Western Ghats into the debate: although they exploded 56 million years ago, I hope that will not happen again in our lifetime.
I particularly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about the tourist tax. When we arrived in Svalbard, only 800 miles from the North Pole, we thought we were heading an expedition into the unknown and the dangerous, but where we were staying we were confronted by about 100 German tourists who would make the average age of the House of Lords seem relatively young. That shows how the tourist industry is changing there: perhaps we should tax them even more for their search and rescue.
I especially thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, for taking all the questions from the noble Lord, Lord West. That was quite undeserved, but the questions were beautifully answered. I thank her for that. On the question of Russia, which the noble Lord raised, I personally invited the Russian ambassador to give evidence, but unfortunately that was not possible. Through the good offices of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, we also asked Mr Chilingarov, the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctic. Unfortunately, neither of those two gave evidence.
Like many of my colleagues, I regret that we are not going to appoint an ambassador for the Arctic. I am pleased that the Minister said that the door is not closed. I saw the noble Lord, Lord Howell, on the Government Benches a while ago—oh, I see that he is still here; I apologise for not noticing him. A year ago he produced a report on soft power, and it seems to me that our recommendation represents a very cheap way of achieving that.
I thank the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for its co-operation, through Jane Rumble, its head of the Polar Regions desk, and the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, for suggesting that the House address this subject. Not least, I thank our special adviser, Professor Klaus Dodds of Royal Holloway College, Susannah Street, our excellent clerk, and Matt Smith, our excellent policy analyst. To the Government I say that I and the other members of my committee will keep our eye on this issue. It is a subject on which Britain needs to wake up, not from a deep sleep but from a snooze. We move forward: the Government’s response is very encouraging in that respect, and we will ensure that we too keep a strong interest in this subject.