Environmental Protection in the Arctic as an International Regime

Abstract

Arctic environmental protection and the protection of species living in the
Arctic are subject to a number of multilateral international treaties, bilateral
agreements, and instruments of soft law, and they are touched upon by the
national laws of the Arctic coastal countries as well. Based on the
theoretical approaches of Oran Young, the paper construes the current
environmental protection in the Arctic as an international regime. The
paper defines the basic features of the Arctic and Antarctic environmental
regimes, such as duration, resilience, an institutional structure,
internationalization and the agreed procedures and processes of the
regime’s development. The paper discusses whether their differences (e.g.
ocean versus continent, inhabitants, military use) have been reflected in
their environmental regimes. By comparing these features and regimes, the
paper concludes that the procedure used in the Antarctic might not be fully
transferrable to the case of the Arctic.