Abstract
ABSTRACT The Arctic is experiencing substantial increases in human activity in areas ranging from fossil fuel and mineral extraction to transport along Arctic waterways. Such actions may yield new sources of economic benefits and further objectives to promote national defense, yet they may also generate potential risks to the Arctic environment. As such, concerns from various stakeholders have been raised regarding how to make Arctic operations better meet sustainability goals and balance defense and economic objectives with environmental degradation. This article describes how decision analytical tools, such as multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), may help identify policies and project proposals that minimize the potential for environmental degradation within a framework of maximizing economic, industrial, and defense objectives. Specifically, MCDA conducts value tradeoffs to assess the utility of various decision alternatives against disparate criteria; for this case, this includes the evaluation of Arctic operation sustainability. This article demonstrates through an example of industrial mining in Greenland how MCDA might serve as a tool to guide uncertain decisions for various Arctic projects, and potentially indicate opportunities to structure such projects to provide greater sustainability for their longer-term operations.
Highlights
The Arctic is currently experiencing an unprecedented level of economic, industrial, and military activity
We explore the use of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) through a case application of industrial mining in Greenland, where a decision analytical approach can help improve and identify strategies that balance industrial goals with sustainability concerns for local and regional communities
Multicriteria decision analysis refers to a class of structured methods used to evaluate alternatives that must be compared against several criteria (Linkov et al 2012a, 2014)
Summary
The Arctic is currently experiencing an unprecedented level of economic, industrial, and military activity. The persistence of pollutants in Arctic lands and waters remains problematic because of the fragility of local ecosystems and the limited opportunities for the natural bioremediation of hazardous contaminants, exacerbating the effects of pollutants and toxins ranging from plastic debris to chemical mine drainage (Barbante et al 2017; Cózar et al 2017). Such pollution can have lasting environmental uptake and can yield unsustainable damages to Arctic flora and fauna (Barry and Price 2015). The Arctic Council has noted that increased defense-, industry-, and transportationbased activities pose risks to the social cohesion and well-being of local indigenous communities, including exposure to noxious pollutants as well as economic legacy issues should industrial or commercial projects
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