Professor Mia Bennett, University of Washington, on the Geo-Economic Future of the Arctic

I'm Jason Mitchell, CIO for Responsible Investment at Mangrove.

You're listening to A Sustainable Future, a podcast about what we're doing today to build a more sustainable world

tomorrow.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast and I hope everyone is staying well.

So for this episode, I want to turn to one of the books that's been sitting at the top of my reading pile over the deep summer, specifically on the geopolitical future of the Arctic.

Now, to be honest, when most of us think of the Arctic, we probably imagine a barren, frigid landscape, but that picture is increasingly out of date.

What was once a frozen desert is fast becoming an international waterway of sorts.

And the region now faces what my latest guest calls twinned crises.

There's an ecological one with the Arctic warming several times faster than the global average.

And there's also another one.

There's a geopolitical crisis as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and renewed great power rivalry redraw the terrain for cooperation and conflict in the high north.

Look no further than the contention around Greenland, or China styling itself as a near-Arctic state, or an Arctic Council that increasingly looks paralyzed.

But the really uncomfortable part is that these two crises effectively feed into one another.

Melting ice is unlocking the very oil, gas, minerals, and shipping routes whose development only accelerates that melting.

In other words, you could say that the crisis has perversely become the business case.

And look, there is a lot happening here, which is why the Arctic has been a long running theme on this podcast.

Going back to my first conversation more than seven years ago with the Royal United Services Institute on the effects of climate change and the strategic militarization of the Arctic.

Which is why it's great to have Professor Mia Bennett on the podcast to discuss her new book, Unfrozen, The Fight for the Future of the Arctic.

We talk about why Arctic exceptionalism has been blown out of the water effectively, the dangers of empty frontier thinking, and how policymakers, businesses, and Arctic communities can realistically reshape governance and development to avoid deepening the crisis.

Mia is an associate professor of geography at the University of Washington and a leading researcher on the geopolitics and environmental transformation of the Arctic.

Her work examines infrastructure, natural resources, development, and emerging technologies in northern frontier regions, combining fieldwork with satellite and geospatial analysis.

And last, she's also the founder and editor of the Arctic-focused blog, Cryopolitics.