Season 2, Ep. 6 — The Arctic: Climate, resources and migration in times of change

Show notes

Below, you will find links to all of the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.

Art & Documentary

How Climate Made History, Pt. 1 - From the Ice Age to the Dawn of Humanity (external link) . Get Factual. YouTube.

The remote archipelago of Svalbard (external link) . DW Documentary. Youtube.

Monet, Jenni. (23 April 2023). ‘Green colonialism’: Indigenous world leaders warn over west’s climate strategy (external link) . The Guardian.

Orange, R. (19 November 2021). Wanted: 100,000 pioneers for a green jobs Klondike in the Arctic (external link) . The Guardian.

Reports and Policy Papers

Duncan, S. (27 September, 2022). Poverty, well-Being and climate change in the Arctic: a Musical perspective (external link) . The Arctic Institute.

Heleniak, T. (2015). Arctic populations and migration (external link) . In, J.N. Larsen and G. Fondahl (Eds.), Arctic human development report (53-104). Nordic Council of Ministers Secretariat.

Heleniak, T. (2020). Polar peoples in the future: Projections of the Arctic population (external link) , Executive Summary. Nordregio.

(PDF file) Northwest Territories’ Immigration Strategy 2017 to 2022 Building a Skilled Workforce and a Vibrant Economy (external link) . Government of the Northwest Territories.

Sutter, J. (29 March 2017). Shishmaref, Alaska: Tragedy of a village built on ice. (external link) CNN.

Books

Damas, D. (2002). Arctic migrants/Arctic villagers: The transformation of Inuit settlement in the central Arctic. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP.

Heleniak, T. (2017). Boom and bust: Population change in Russia’s Arctic citie (external link) s. In, R. Orttung and (Ed.), Sustaining Russia’s Arctic cities: Resource politics, migration, and climate change (67-87). Berghahn Books.

Heleniak, T. & Napper, O. (2020). The role of statistics in relation to Arctic indigenous realities (external link) . In, T. Koivurova, E. Grete Broderstad, D. Cambou, D. Dorough and F. (Eds.) Routledge handbook of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic (pp. 5-27). Routledge.

Heleniak, T., Turunen, E. & Wang, S. (2020). Demographic change in the Arctic (external link) . In, K. Coates and C. Holroyd (Eds.), Palgrave handbook on Arctic policy 41-59). Palgrave Macmillan.

Jóhannesson, G. T. (2016). A fish called tourism: Emergent realities of tourism policy in Iceland. In, G. T. Jóhannesson, C. Ren and R. van der Duim, Tourism encounters and Controversies (pp. 181-200). Routledge.

Mostafanezhad, M., Azcárate, M. C., & Norum, R. (2021). Tourism geopolitics: Assemblages of infrastructure, affect, and imagination (external link) . University of Arizona Press.

Mostafanezhad, M., Norum, R., Shelton, E. J., & Thompson-Carr, A. (Eds.). (2016). Political ecology of tourism: Community, power and the environment. Routledge.

Norum, R. (2016). Barentsburg and beyond: Coal, science, tourism and the geopolitical imaginaries of Svalbard’s ‘New North’ (external link) . In, G. Huggan and L. Jensen (Eds), Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North: Unscrambling the Arctic (26-52). Palgrave Pivot.

Scholarly Articles

Heleniak, T. (2020). Polar peoples in the future: Projections of the Arctic populations (external link) . Nordregio Working Paper.

Heleniak, T. (2020). The future of the Arctic populations (external link) . Polar Geography, 44(2).

Huggan, G., & Norum, R. (2015). Introduction: the postcolonial arctic. Moving Worlds: J. Transcultural Writings, 14(2), 1-5.

Kristoffersen, B., Norum, R., & Kramvig, B. (2015). Arctic whale watching and Anthropocene ethics (external link) . In, M. Gren and E. Huijbens (Eds.), Tourism and the Anthropocene (pp. 94-110). Routledge.

Mostafanezhad, M., & Norum, R. (2019). The anthropocenic imaginary: Political ecologies of tourism in a geological epoch (external link) . Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27(4), 421-435.

Norum, R. (2022). Notes from the Icehouse:Navigating transformations and transdisciplinarity in Northern Finland (external link) . Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History, 15(3): 623-633.

Ramage, J., Jungsberg, L., Wang, S., Westermann, S., Lantuit, H., & Heleniak, T. (2021). Population living on permafrost in the Arctic (external link) . Population and Environment, 43, pp.22-38.

Sokolova, F. H. (2016). Migration processes in the Russian Arctic (external link) . Arctic, 25, 137-149.

Yeasmin, N., & Koivurova, T. (2019). Immigrant women and their social adaptation in the arctic (external link) . In, S.Uusiautti and N. Yeasmin (Eds), Human Migration in the Arctic (67-89). Palgrave Macmillan.

Transcript

Maggie Perzyna: Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores regional migration issues in a global context. This series is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead podcasting. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. The Arctic has been home to Indigenous peoples for millennia. And to this day, Inuit and First Nations peoples are the primary stewards of its land. In the past few centuries, settlers have been drawn to the Arctic's remote wilderness, majestic landscapes, and ample resources. In order to better understand migration to the region, we need to examine resource booms, climate change, and global market forces. In this episode, we dissect the intricate dance between the global demand for resources and the Arctic's changing climate, where the push and pull of resources, climate, and migration, create a complex and ever evolving tapestry. As we navigate this frontier, we'll look at who calls Arctic home, and those who have been drawn here by the siren call of opportunity and change. In a moment, I'll be joined by two esteemed researchers to learn more about how global markets for resources and climate change are shipping migration to the Arctic. But first, we'll hear from someone who recently adopted the Northwest Territories as her new home and who works with fellow immigrants on a daily basis. Her name is Malini Sengupta, and her love for the region is palpable.

Malini Sengupta: My house is facing the great Slave Lake. It has an absolutely breathtaking, you know, landscape we have rocks which are billion years old, and let's not forget about the Northern Lights. I think we are definitely extremely popular for the mesmerizing Northern Lights.

Maggie Perzyna: Malini originally immigrated from India to British Columbia in 2011, where she lived between Vancouver and Victoria for eight years. The comforts of city life made it somewhat easy to adjust to life in Canada. But Malini missed being part of a close knit community, like the one she had back home. So in 2019, she decided to move to Yellowknife and she's never looked back.

Malini Sengupta: You know, a lot of immigrants, we come from a collective society and a collective society is where all the communities come together. Yellowknife is amazing. I love Vancouver and Victoria, don't get me wrong. I loved hiking and biking, but I felt at home the moment I moved to Yellowknife. Like I had a fantastic opportunity. My friends are from Łutselkʼe and from Dettah and from Behchokǫ̀. And my roommates, they're Indigenous. And this was a fantastic opportunity for me to have that firsthand work and living together with them.

Maggie Perzyna: Melanie works as a coordinator at the Yellowknife Immigration Partnership where she helps bridge gaps and create opportunities for newcomer immigrants.

Malini Sengupta: Our frontline workers are basically a language school where people come and learn English and French, you know. Then our frontline workers, are settlement services, people who are helping immigrants, immigrant families to get into school, you know - community connect. They also understand on the ground what the challenges are.

Maggie Perzyna: Over the course of her time in this role. Malini has seen folks immigrate to the North for a range of reasons. Some, like her are looking for a better work life balance than they have in southern Canada. Others come for economic opportunities, whether they be in mining at an army base, or in professions, they may have been trained for it in their countries of origin.

Malini Sengupta: Sometimes down South a lot of qualified skilled workers, you know, have to do semi-skilled work, but up North you know we have really, really good positions and getting relevant jobs in their field. You know, sense of belonging, you know, sense of achievement, and translating their work experience and their education in the field they want to be.

Maggie Perzyna: These opportunities have unfortunately been met with a fair share of challenges in these past few years. Between the onset of the pandemic, and then a series of natural disasters, newcomers have had an extremely challenging time, not only arriving in the north but also having the economic means to stay.

Malini Sengupta: In the recent years, 2020-22 was COVID. And then between COVID we had flood. And then we had the wildfire. So, what was happening is the newcomers are leaving definitely down South because can you imagine like when your border is closed, let's say you're a newcomer, and you're an immigrant, you know, you have to do a language test. And during that time, COVID we did not have all the language tests out here. But during that time, when your border is closed, and you get out of, you know, Northwest Territory, once you come in, you have to quarantine for two weeks. So, two weeks when you are on a hourly wage, you lose your money, you know, and what had to happen is due to the wildfire, it has been very, very smoky. And it is an additional challenge for the vulnerable population, including, you know, children and elderly.

Maggie Perzyna: While the reality on the ground has been challenging for the past few years. Malani is seeing some forward movement. And she's hopeful that between local and federal support, both newcomers and lifelong residents of the North can begin to live more comfortable lives.

Malini Sengupta: Right now, just we just came out of it. So, we are still assessing the situation. And the government is stepping up in order to support the small and midsize businesses, but we definitely need much more support from the federal government in terms of, you know, reviving this community.

Maggie Perzyna: Many thanks to Malini Sengupta for sharing her experiences as an immigrant, and as a coordinator at the Yellowknife Immigration Partnership. To help broaden our understanding of how migration affects the Arctic, we have Roger Norum and Timothy Heleniak. Roger is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oulu in Finland. Timothy is a Senior Research Fellow at Nordregio, the Nordic Center for Spatial Development in Stockholm, Sweden. Thank you both for joining me.

Timothy Heleniak: Thank you very much.

Roger Norum: Thanks so much for the invitation.

Maggie Perzyna: The Arctic has always been a place of opportunity. So, let's start with some history. What has migration traditionally looked like in the Arctic? Timothy let's start with you.

Timothy Heleniak: Let me start by saying that the Arctic is a rather vast and diverse region. There's different definitions of the Arctic in natural and social sciences, but they would typically classify the state of Alaska in the United States, the three northern territories of Canada, Yukon, Northwest Territory, and Nunavut, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic and the northern most regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland as being part of the Arctic. Russia is a bit more complex. It includes the northern regions, but also so many regions in Siberia that are to the south. So, with that background, there is rather a diverse pattern of migration into the Arctic. A lot of people originally went there to basically to make money. If we start with the Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, it was gold and his mining, drew people there. The Russian Arctic had a little bit different history. I mean, there were certainly people in the the Russian Arctic, in Siberia before the Soviet times. But it was certainly when the Soviet Union took over in the early 1920s, they wanted to industrialize quickly. And they did this partly based on the resources of the Arctic. And this was a centrally planned economy, it was not a market economy. And a lot of people were actually sent either sent to the Russian Arctic or Siberia, originally through the Gulag system, and later through different wages incentives that drew people. So, it was a place that people could go, or in some cases were forced to go early on. So, it is a quite diverse migration history to the arctic.

Roger Norum: Just to add to something that Timothy said, I think, you know, when thinking about sort of migration to the Arctic, it's also important to think about mobility more broadly, to this part of the world, which, as Tim said, is extremely diverse. And, you know, I'm cautious of sort of essentializing such a huge and diverse part of the world. But if we think back to, you know, even a couple 1000 years ago, what did the Arctic mean to people who had never been there? To people who wrote about it to the ancient Greeks? You know, the people who live in the Arctic, where, you know, they lived beyond the north wind and this fabulous landscape of sunlight and warmth and a turtle spring, light was sort of cast onto this land of enlightenment, that was full of possibility. It was a way of sort of, I suppose, projecting onto this unknown space, the kind of means of overcoming the decadence of the modern individual. And so you know, throughout the 'Age of Exploration', the 'Age of Discovery', you know, well past the enlightenment, the region continued to be mythologized as this sort of unknown, inaccessible, forbidden place that, you know, was a boundary that kind of couldn't be crossed. And I think that's important to take into consideration as we think about what's happening to the Arctic today. You know, it's only very recently that the Arctic has really been sort of opened up to the masses due to changes in affordances of transportation, transportation costs, people's sort of ability to be more mobile, interest in being more mobile. And these sort of early representations and characterizations of this landscape while, you know, now many of us have been to the Arctic in person and stepped on Arctic soil or permafrost, and then maybe seen okay, what is this place actually, like, I think we're still influenced by these early representations and characterizations of this place as an 'other' as a distant, as a somehow very different space. And so, the kind of contemporary history, I think, is entangled with these, these sort of, you know, earlier historical, cultural and ideological representations. And so, all of these, you know, the, the multiple landscapes of the Arctic, its aesthetic landscapes, its political, cultural, economic, scientific landscapes, these are all, inexorably intermeshed with one another. And I think that's really important to remember when we talk about what's happening today, and what might happen in the future.

Maggie Perzyna: And Roger, what's drawing people to the Arctic now?

Roger Norum: I think clearly its potential for economic riches, certainly, in terms of resource extraction, potential new labour markets, but also, climate change itself, actually, in a very sort of facile way. You know, the arctic fox, the polar bear, the whale, charismatic megafauna that live in the Arctic, and people want to see, because of general interest in animals. Because the images of these, you know, particularly the polar bear, have been brandished all over the planet for the past, I don't know, 20, 30 years, as a key symbol of what humans have done to the planet, and destruction they've had on the environment and non-humans. So, environmental change is encouraging interest in the in the Arctic, certainly among tourists, environmental change and global warming lead to this idea of 'last chance' tourism, which is the sense that, okay, we need to see this region before we destroy it, or before it's destroyed, or we need to see Arctic glaciers, the Arctic ice sheet before it melts. Of course, the irony, or the paradox, or the sad part of that story is that, you know, the same tourism that is trying to see all these things before it goes away is also contributing to that very act.

Maggie Perzyna: Timothy, do you have anything to add? What's drawing people to the Arctic now?

Timothy Heleniak: Well, many of the same factors that drew them to the Arctic originally. You know, it's a place to make money. Often times, it's adventure. I mean, the Arctic is still considered a rather exotic place. And people sometimes go there for a period of time or a career, just because it's so different from the southern regions of the Arctic countries.

Maggie Perzyna: The Arctic Circle crosses many borders touching North America, Europe and Russia. Each of these areas has its own environmental protection and resource management policies in the Arctic. How did these policies affect migration dynamics in each region? Timothy, can you give us an idea of the policy landscape in North America and Russia?

Timothy Heleniak: I can try.

Maggie Perzyna: Big question [laughs].

Timothy Heleniak: Yeah [laughs]. I mean, it's an often been repeated point that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet. And as I said, the Arctic is a quite diverse place. The impacts of climate change, resource management are quite different among the regions of the Arctic. Among the impacts that we've identified. Certainly, there's the thawing of permafrost, which will affect buildings that are built on permafrost. There's quite a few of those across different parts of the Arctic, the loss of sea ice will impact coastal communities such as settlements in the Barrier Islands of Alaska. Shishmaref has been this kind of poster child of global warming and the need for that to move. Other places increase wildfires will impact on populations. I was in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada this summer in June. One day, the smoke from the nearby wildfires was so bad that I had to wear my COVID mask that I had kept in my pocket for a couple of years. But a month after I left the entire town of 20,000 people had to be evacuated to Southern Canada. With those differences in climate impacts, there's certainly differences in migration patterns. Hard to figure out what all of them will be.

Maggie Perzyna: Roger, can you help us understand the EU context?

Roger Norum: Sure. In 2021, the EU came up with a comprehensive policy framework for the Arctic region, which it extremely inventively called the 'EU Arctic Policy'. Lots of Arctic countries did this on their own. My own university has just actually released its own Arctic strategy. So, this is this is something that there's a lot that's been written about the kind of first, I think, and most important point that the EU wanted to take stance on was climate change, and environmental protection. And they emphasize the need for climate action and protecting the environment in the Arctic. They sort of, the EU wanted to support measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable development in the region, combating the effects of climate change, including the melting of Arctic ice and its global implications. And I think it's also important to remember that we're talking about a region and actually a comparatively fairly underpopulated region, if we compare it to other regions in the in the world, but the kind of global implications of this region are extremely, extremely critical, both in terms of what you know, climate was the the Arctic is often a sort of benchmark and a poster child for climate change. A bellwether for seeing what's going to happen to the rest of the planet, because the Arctic is so much in the public eye, I don't know past, let's say 20 years. It's a hotspot in many different senses. So, the EU looked at climate change, environmental protection also took a stance on sustainable development to think about some of environmental and economic and social aspects. And one of the things that the EU has tried to do is to try to generate or increase or improve cooperation among Arctic states and Indigenous peoples to promote responsible economic activities, developmental activities, while also preserving the Arctic's fragile environment. And the EU is also looking at other things like research and science trends to encourage more and more diverse science, including social science and humanities research, which is often forgotten about when we're when we're thinking about climate science, the sort of social aspects of biodiversity loss and how sort of societies respond to these things. So, these were, this is sort of the main things that the EU was trying to do to sort of create, you know, generate awareness.

Maggie Perzyna: Can you tell me about the connection between changing resource availability and migration trends in the Arctic? Timothy, how do resource booms and busts influence migration patterns?

Timothy Heleniak: Thank you for that question. It's often times stated that there are three pillars of the Arctic economy. The first is resource extraction. The second is government, there's often times when large or larger government transfers northern territories and elsewhere. And then third is the Indigenous population. And we've seen across the Arctic places like Alaska, there wasn't many people after the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. In the early 1900s, there was discovery of gold, large influx of people that kind of tailed off soon after that. Same was true in the Yukon Territory. The discovery of gold brought lot of people there. And a place like Alaska has gone through these booms and busts in terms of the number of people, the discovery of oil, the building of the pipeline, the finishing of the pipeline. And the same is true in Russia today. The places that are growing in terms of population are there the two regions, the Khanty-Mansiy and Yamal-Nenets regions, so West Siberia, these are the oil and gas regions. Populations there are still growing. And most of the other regions are declining. But one other area that we kind of haven't mentioned is the military. There's been a large military presence in the Arctic. Certainly, in Alaska there was a large building of base as drawing a lot of people to Alaska. After the Cold War ended a lot of people left those regions. I would assume the same trend took place in Russia, the Russian Arctic, and I know it's taken place that after the Cold War closure of bases, a lot of people left places in northern Sweden, northern Norway, etc.

Maggie Perzyna: The North has captivated imaginations for generations. This attracts a different kind of influx to the local population, tourists. Roger you've written about tourism in the Arctic. Can you tell me what effects the flow of tourists has on northern communities?

Roger Norum: Sure. This obviously depends on where we're talking about. Tourism in in northern Russia, tourism in northern Norway, and tourism in Alaska, you know there is a very different type of tourism, very different types of activities, different infrastructures. But generally speaking, I mean, tourism in the Arctic has both positive and negative effects. And its impact can really vary depending on the scale and type of tourism as well as how its regulated or how its managed. So, some of the obvious positive effects, certainly economic benefits, I mean, tourism can provide a significant economic boost to Arctic communities that may be suffering due to say, out-migration, changes in agricultural practices. And it can very simply create jobs in different sectors, transportation, hospitality, guiding, and these can help diversify local economies. Also, cultural exchange, in theory, at least tourism can kind of facilitate cultural exchange between Arctic communities and visitors. So, tourists would have the opportunity to learn about Indigenous cultures or traditions, lifestyles, potentially promoting understanding and appreciation. And there's obviously flow in the other direction of kind of cultural communication and different ways of learning about other people on the planet. Conservation awareness is another obvious benefit. You know, tourism can very clearly raise awareness about the Arctic's unique or certainly very different environment and the importance of its conservation. But there's negative effects as well. The clear one, the kind of the most obvious one is environmental impact, and the adverse environmental effects that tourism can have on fragile Arctic ecosystems. Often that, you know, experience actually fairly little human activity or human action. One problem with tourism, the sort of boom of tourism in the Arctic, in recent years has just been sheer numbers. You know, if you think about, say, the archipelago of Svalbard, in northern Norway, you know, the actual population of Svalbard sort of year-round is about 2500 people 2500 to 3000 people. When a cruise ship comes in, that cruise ship could bring 3000 people in a single day. And you know these lands, this permafrost is simply not necessarily set up to kind of manage that kind of traffic. And with that comes vehicle use, off-road vehicle, waste disposal, which can lead to pollution and habitat disruption. So, there are lots of, you know, negative effects. It accelerates climate change, overcrowding, strain on the infrastructure, cultural disruption, you know, Indigenous cultures, traditional ways of life can be, you know, disrupted, potentially negatively affected by rapid or unregulated tourism growth.

Maggie Perzyna: Timothy, are there any unique cultural considerations associated with migration in the Arctic, given the diverse mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in the region?

Timothy Heleniak: Yes, certainly there are. Let me start by saying that when we look at the Arctic, there's an important distinction between Arctic Indigenous populations and others, outsiders however you defined that. I won't go into details, but how the Arctic classify people and whether they have a concept of Indigenous peoples differs quite a bit, I can refer you to a book chapter that I wrote. But in a lot of these Arctic places, the Indigenous population, however defined, and the outsider population live in quite different places. A good example is that of Alaska. Most of the outsider populations live in Fairbanks and Anchorage and Juneau, whereas the native population, Alaska Native population lives in many of the smaller settlements in western, northern Alaska. And the same is true if you go into Russia. A lot of the smaller settlements of those that are the homelands of these, what they call a 'small, numbered peoples'. They live in these smaller settlements where the outsider, the Russian Slavic populations have moved these places, live in the larger cities. So, there's that difference. And then there's certainly a difference in terms of fertility patterns, mortality patterns, migration patterns. Most Indigenous peoples, remember, this is their homeland that they live in, whereas many of the outsider populations they came from, I'll give the example of Russia. These people migrated during the Soviet period from Central Russia to the Arctic, it wasn't for them a home. So, when the Soviet Union broke up, the system collapsed, they left. A common question I encounter when I travel to the Arctic and meet people is, 'So where are you from?' I mean, the assumption is you're not from the Arctic, you're an outsider. That's a rather broad brush, but typically that is the pattern that we see. It's a large outsider population with ties elsewhere and the assumption is you work there for a period of time, a career and then you retire to the central parts of the Arctic states.

Maggie Perzyna: What are the implications of migration for the sustainability and well-being of Arctic communities, Roger?

Roger Norum: I think the increase in migration to and in the Arctic poses a couple of significant challenges for the region, for its communities, and now also for the broader international community. One of the main ones, certainly if you live in the Arctic, I live just below the Arctic Circle. So technically not in the Arctic, although, in the winter, it certainly feels with 20 degrees below centigrade temperatures feels very Arctic-y. One of the main challenges is infrastructure and services. Many Arctic communities are small, they're remote, they're often seem to be very peripheral, which can affect what kind of resources they're given by the state. And they have limited infrastructure and limited essential services like education, housing, or health care. And a sudden influx of migrants can really put a strain on these resources leading to overcrowding, potential tensions, increased demand on local and national governments. But there's also potential cultural and social impacts. You know, new groups of people coming in from the outside, particularly if they're from a different country, or different ethnic group or going to speak different languages. If the numbers are high enough, this sort of arrival can disrupt social fabric of, again, quite small communities, Indigenous local communities that maybe have actually lived quite well on their own, with sort of Indigenous members and local members for a very long time. But rapid change in the sort of demographic makeup of a community can lead to cultural clashes, obvious language barriers, but also differences in lifestyles or in assumptions, or expectations can lead to tensions and conflicts. And then a lot of the challenges that go along with tourism, environmental impacts. So, again, when you have large numbers of people moving in, this can potentially harm wildlife and habitats as well as there's a risk of pollution from increased presence. There's security and geopolitical challenges, as we've often seen, or as we've seen a number of times in the past five or six years ago, with sort of, you know, different states kind of plant, literally planting flags on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean floor to stake their claim on a heinous of wetland, or what oil field, or sort of, you know, gas shale field might come up. Yeah, these are some of the kind of main concerns, I think.

Maggie Perzyna: How are infrastructure and services being affected by shifts in population, Timothy?

Timothy Heleniak: Yeah, just to kind of add on to what Roger has mentioned before. Yeah, with service, or excuse me, infrastructure. When you build an airport to a place, I mean that's going to bring a lot more people. I'm involved in a project called, 'Infra North: Transport, Infrastructures and sustainable Northern Communities'. And what we're looking at is, what is the role of transport infrastructure in sustaining some of these communities? A good example is work I've been doing in the Faroe Islands. The Faroes are in the process of building this rather extensive system of bridges, tunnels, including some subsea tunnels, and this is linking the population of the different islands together. But it also has the negative effect of bringing more and more tourists to the Faroes. I mean, this is a good way to grow the economy a bit, but you know, there's a limit to how many you can bring it in. And Roger mentioned this before. Iceland is one of these places that's on the verge of becoming over-touristed. I mean the population is 350,000. But there's, there's five or six times that number of tourists that come every year. Some of the airports in Greenland, I know are being extended. So, people are going to be able to fly directly from different places in North America to Greenland. And as Roger said earlier, to see that the maybe the last ice sheet melt before it before it's gone. So, there's both positive and negative impacts of this infrastructure development.

Roger Norum: Maybe just to add on something that Tim said, I think Iceland is a really good example. You know, often in these communities in these countries, the thought surrounding tourism has been that numbers are good. We need numbers, we need bums on seats. But it's often quite rare actually, for planners, and community members and anyone else for that matter, like the tourism scholars, to sit down together and really think sustainably about, 'How do we want this thing to develop? And under what conditions and what might things look like in a few years?' There's this great article from 2015 by an Icelandic tourism scholar Gunner Thor Jóhannesson. The article was called, 'A fish called tourism'. And he, you know, in 2015, forecasted the dangers of thinking about tourism as just another business opportunity. You know, Iceland is a small country. It has a fragile landscape. But at that time, Iceland was in the wake of an economic crisis. There was a really euphoric sense about what tourism could do to Iceland. In Iceland tourism was slowly adopted in the late 90s as a solution to agricultural change, and farmers were actually offered subsidies by the state to move from herding sheep to herding tourists. And much like Greenland, tourism and Iceland seem to offer this beam of hope, since the economy was in crisis. And over the past eight years, I don't know if any of you have been to Reykjavik. lately. I was there a couple of weeks ago, walking through downtown Reykjavik, I think you'd be really hard pressed - and I think a lot of Icelanders would agree with me - to actually find anyone who was actually Icelandic on the main street of Laugavegur. And, you know, this is creating huge debates in the country. Huge problems. Of course, it's brought a lot of economic development is brought a lot of wealth, not always in a sort of equitable or just manner, as with many tourism enterprises, it's often a few owners who tend to monopolize, you know, different industries and tourism. But I think Iceland is a good example of how Arctic communities have sought to sort of approach tourism, what they've experienced, and might be a good model to look at for cautioning what could very easily happen when you have large numbers of people moving into a very small community and potentially staying. At the moment it doesn't look like Iceland runs any risk of losing interest among the global population of tourists eager to find, you know, that ShangriLa in the north?

Maggie Perzyna: How are Arctic communities and governments adapting to the challenges posed by increased migration, particularly in the context of resource development and changing climate conditions, Timothy?

Timothy Heleniak: Yeah, let me give you one example, I'm doing some work in northern Sweden, in Norrbotten. This is a place that has abundant energy. So, it's attracting a lot of different industries, data centers are located there. There's a cool climate, rather resilient energy grid stable political system. So, in order to achieve this green transition, in addition to the large investment, they need to attract another - they want to attract - an additional 100,000 people to the region over the next 15 or so years. This is a region that right now has about 240,000 people. So, adding another 100,000 people would be rather a large population increase. People in southern Sweden show rather large reluctance to move to northern Sweden. So, a lot of this labour will need to come from abroad. And so with all the issues around the integration of people in a place like Sweden, what Roger was talking before about Iceland and the tourism. Iceland 30 years ago in the 1990s had about 2% foreign born people. It was a rather insular place. Everybody spoke Icelandic to each other. Right now, the foreign born population is about 20%. So in the course of 30 years, the foreign born population has gone from 2 to 20%. So, this is having a rather dramatic effect on the population. Like Roger said, it's rather hard to find people speaking Icelandic in Iceland today.

Roger Norum: I think with respect to resource development, it's really important - Tim was speaking about Norrbotten. It's a region in northern Sweden. This is a region that has been at the center of many debates, not just on Indigenous rights to land but also mining, resource extraction. There was a big to-do about a decade ago when the CEO of a mining company. Foreign mining company, Beowulf Mining, was asked what local people would say about his mining project in Kallak, Sweden. This is a small community outside of Jokkmokk in Norrbotten. The mine that was proposed at the time was highly, highly controversial. It was a plan to exploit one of the largest unexploited iron ore deposits in Sweden. And the CEO showed this kind of prototypical photograph of a landscape of Lapland, barren, remote, you know, no people in the image. And he was asked, you know, what would local people say about this mining project? And he answered, pointing at this photograph, what local people? So, there is still a sense, again, going back to some of the early understandings or misunderstandings or representations or misrepresentations of the Arctic as this remote, barren, silent landscape where there are no people. Or where there were thought to be no people. There's still a sense that, you know, the people that are there don't matter, certainly not to big mining companies that have the huge potential for massive extraction of resources and lining of pockets. These senses that the Arctic is a landscape that's there for the taking, as it has been think in the European or the or the Western colonial imaginary, for, you know, a couple of millennia. I think those still persist. And I think when you're, when you're talking about resources and what resources can do and how they can be managed, I think it's really important to not sort of ignore these ideas of what this landscape has meant and what it's still often thought to represent and be able to do.

Maggie Perzyna: Tim, you've written about the future of Arctic populations. Looking forward, how do you see the relationship between global resource markets climate change and migration continuing to evolve in the Arctic?

Timothy Heleniak: Yes, I have written several articles about the future of Arctic populations, looking at population projections done by the National Statistical Offices in the Arctic countries. The world has just passed 8 billion people and somewhere around the middle of the century, we expect the global population to peak at about 10 billion. The Arctic as defined in here and the 'Arctic Human Development Report' is not expected to change a whole lot. It's about 4 million now. There will be increases in Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, other places. Probably decreases in the Russian Arctic. But the access to resources with climate change, there may be increased access, some places it's easier to build roads. Ports become more accessible for a longer portion of the year. So, what we may see, unfortunately, is this kind of vicious cycle of using resources in the Arctic, which fuels climate change. And if climate change allows more resources to be exploited, we'll just kind of continue or accelerate this cycle of global warming.

Maggie Perzyna: Roger what do you see in the future?

Roger Norum: I would like to be positive about the future of the Arctic. I'm generally a positive person, or I see myself as one. It's not always easy to be positive when thinking about what the future holds for the Arctic. At the moment, the Arctic is warming at a rate approximately twice as fast as the global average. And that trend is, is slated to continue, which is only going to lead to more thawing permafrost, rising temperatures, reductions in sea ice, and these changes are going to have far-reaching consequences, not just for the region's ecosystems, sea levels and weather patterns but for the rest of the planet. Resource development is another real concern. The Arctic is still despite lots of extraction that's gone on so far, still really rich in natural resources. Oil, gas, minerals, also fish. And as the global demand continues, for these resources, the Arctic is a very easy go-to place for a number of different reasons for increased exploration and exploitation. Shipping routes is another problem, the reduction in sea ice that's been going on over the past decades, has opened up new shipping routes. The northern sea route, the Northwest Passage, for example. And these routes offer faster, more cost-effective transportation between Europe and Asia, which can potentially lead to more regular commercial shipping in the Arctic. There's other concerns as well, geopolitical competition, certainly, you know, the Arctic is a kind of growing geopolitical hot potato among both Arctic and non-Arctic states. And that is because of the reasons I just mentioned access to resources, shipping routes, strategic interests. Conservation and biodiversity is another huge concern. For me what all these things lead to, is the hope that local Arctic communities and national state governments, can work together with universities with scientific institutions to do collaborative, respectful, mindful, impactful research. This is often called 'participatory research' or 'respectful citizen science'. Where you have scientists working with local citizens, not just to gather data, but also to think about the questions that should be asked not just thinking about how to solve the problems, but actually, before a research project is carried out to actually for, you know, scientists, and local politicians and Indigenous members of the community to sit down and think about what the questions that should be asked by the research should do. And I think one way to address all of these problems of, you know, resource development, shipping routes, accelerated climate change, is to look at this region and work with this region, and work together as a community that sort of straddles different demographic groups and different interests, different ways of understanding the landscape or human-animal interactions or seeing the future in a way that is sort of respectful of many different groups. I think this is one really useful thing that's come out of all the concern about the Arctic over the past decades and all of the research that's been done on it, is that it's become really clear that to do impactful work on this region, we have to work together. And we have to think together and not work in isolation as has often been the case for many academic disciplines over the past centuries.

Timothy Heleniak: I fully agree with everything Rogers have said but let me add one, one point that pertains to this war that Russia's conducting in Ukraine. It appears that there's no immediate end in sight. And so Russia is becoming isolated somewhat economically, and also internationally in terms of Arctic research, Arctic policy. It was recently suspended from the Arctic Council. And this is rather unfortunate because so much of the Arctic lies within Russia. Non-Russians are having a difficult time getting into Russia and even more so traveling to different parts of the Russian Arctic. I mentioned, I was involved in this project called 'Nunataryuk', which examines the impact of permafrost thaw. And we've lost the last two field seasons looking at the impacts of permafrost thaw in parts of the Russian Arctic. And we lost several before that, because of the pandemic. So, it's becoming increasingly difficult to collaborate with a lot of our Russian colleagues at a time when we should, as Roger said, be collaborating with these people. I hesitate to reach out to some of my Russian colleagues because I don't want them to get in trouble because they have contact with foreign agents. That's Russia labels people like myself. So, I agree with what Roger said, it is important to collaborate at this crucial time. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so.

Roger Norum: I agree that it is a real shame for science, that so many academic research projects that had Russian partners had to drop them. I had two projects myself, one of them kind of ironically, was funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Nordic Working Group on biodiversity. And it was a partnership with University of Oulu, NTNU Trondheim, in Norway, and Petrozavodsk State University. The project was called, 'ENVIROSENT, teaching environmental practices across borders from center to periphery'. The project we thought of in 2019, in 2022, it basically fell apart. We had to lose our Russian partner. But the entire idea of that project was to get beyond these political or these geopolitical borders, also these linguistic and cultural and social borders, to think about the Bering Sea region as a kind of communal space that sort of symbiotically is a part of the lives of everyone who lives in this region. And the entire aim was to was to look beyond these borders, which are set up by states, which are often established by funding agencies, and which are sort of reproduced in a lot of the scientific work that goes on that tends to sort of fall along national or, or let's say, regional, by which I mean EU lines. And Russia has often been left off of that. And this funding was actually intended to get beyond that. And then what happened, the aggression against Ukraine began. European scientists, researchers were instructed to officially drop all ties with their Russian partners. Basically, change their projects. It adversely affected many scientific projects. And it is a real shame and I hope that there will be a future where scientists, where educators, I mean, scientists never apolitical, but where we can think beyond sort of geopolitical boundaries and borders that are set up that are only going to adversely affect the natural environment, the natural social environment of regions, in particular one like the Arctic, which is as fragile as they come.

Maggie Perzyna: Thanks to Roger Norum and Timothy Helleniak for joining me today. And thank you for listening. This is a CERC Migration podcast produced in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to Borders & Belonging on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on migration and the Arctic, please visit the show notes. I'm Maggie Perzyna. Thanks for listening.