Policy Responses to New Ocean Threats: Arctic Warming, Maritime Industries, and International Environmental Regulation

This chapter studies international regulatory responses to new threats that growing maritime industrial activities in a warming Arctic pose to the ocean environment. Climate change accelerates the melting of Arctic Ocean ice, making the area more accessible to maritime industries such as shipping and offshore oil and gas production. These industrial operations can have negative external effects on this ecologically vulnerable region. This chapter investigates how states have responded to such threats, assessing and comparing the stringency of international environmental regulation of maritime industries in the Arctic. Stringency is the product of a regulation’s formal tightness and its substantive ambition. Tightness refers to legality, precision, monitoring and enforcement. Ambition includes changes in scope and in requirement levels from temporal and global perspectives. Empirically, this chapter presents a stringency database that includes all regulations that have partly or wholly covered the Arctic from 1950 to 2017. Regulatory stringency is compared across industries (shipping, oil and gas), regulators (International Maritime Organization, Arctic Council, and OSPAR Commission), external effects, and time. The chapter shows that Arctic warming has been accompanied by increased regulatory activity to address environmental impacts of maritime industries. However, the stringency of these regulations is found to vary considerably across regulatory bodies. Several regulatory gaps persist. The chapter’s findings can guide future research on the drivers of stringent regulation and its effects. Policymakers can use the findings to identify regulatory gaps as well as blueprints for more stringent regulations in a warming and threatened Arctic Ocean.