The topic for the meeting was “Responding to emerging challenges in the Arctic” and Deputy Ministers were to discuss the leadership role of the Arctic Council. Thereafter, the meeting focused on the issues of Search and Rescue, Short-Lived Climate Forcers, and Sustaining Arctic Observation Networks, i.e., three areas on which the Arctic Council is expected to present significant results at the Ministerial Meeting in 2011.
Mandated by Ministers in the Tromsoe Ministerial declaration, the Deputy Ministers' meeting was conceived in response to a desire for more frequent political engagement within the overall framework of the Ministerial mandate for the Arctic Council.
The first session of the day consisted of a tour de table during which deputy ministers, permanent participants, and observers raised topics they considered most crucial to the future work of the Arctic Council.
Consensus among the national representatives centered round the need to reinforce the science based decision shaping role of the Arctic Council, while at the same time preserving the unique permanent participant role of indigenous people within the council and determining an appropriate role for the observers.
Among other things, the Danish/Greenlandic/Faroese delegate Inuuteq Holm Olsen noted that indigenous peoples and other people of the Arctic want development and sustainability, i.e., exactly the core purposes of the council. On the area of sustainable development, the delegate suggested, the council should develop into being more of a decision-making instrument rather than merely a decision-shaping one.
All delegation spokespersons stressed the need for strengthening the Arctic Council. Russian delegate, Ambassador at large Anton Vasiliev, remarked that rather than looking upon the Arctic Sea coastal states meetings (A5) as weakening of the role of the Arctic Council, A5 meetings had actually resulted in growing support for the Arctic Council as the main forum for Arctic policy discussions.
ICC Chair James Stotts said that permanent participants felt that their place at the table was not secure and that they were in danger of being squeezed out. To the ICC, the need seemed not so much for a reform of the Arctic Council as to regroup and refocus on the true virtues of the Arctic Council with fair and equitable solutions reached by member states and permanent participants and no one else.
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