The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and Svalbard, the archipelago between the North Pole and Norway, is warming seven times faster.
Most maps still treat the region as empty. Four million people live there, Russia holds half of it, and that half is now closed to the Western scientists who used to measure it.
"So I don't see a way to break this feedback loop within a kind of capitalist extractive global economic system, honestly."
Mia Bennett wrote Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic with Klaus Dodds, founded the Arctic news site Cryopolitics, and does her own fieldwork on Arctic infrastructure using satellite and geospatial data.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 43 minutes of audio, 18 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Mia Bennett, associate professor of geography at the University of Washington, co-author of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic and founder of the Arctic news site Cryopolitics
🎙️ Host: Jason Mitchell, CIO for responsible investment at Man Group, who has run this podcast for more than seven years
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 on A Sustainable Future (Man Group)
🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 43 min | ✅ Time saved: 25 min
Key Takeaways
Arctic exceptionalism ended with the invasion of Ukraine, not with Crimea Cooperation in the region survived the annexation of Crimea for nearly another decade
Melting ice is what makes the new extraction possible, and Bennett sees no way out of the loop
Half the Arctic has gone dark to Western science, and satellites do not close the gap Permafrost, carbon and radioactive waste can only be measured on the ground
Sanctioned Russian commodities still reach buyers through third countries Dubai has become a clearing point for Russian capital and goods
The US already has the right to build more bases in Greenland without owning it Bennett put the polls at well over 80%, close to 90%, of Greenlanders against joining the US
Militarization, not climate change, is paying for the Arctic's new runways and ports
Cuts to US polar science are moving researchers to Canada, France and Norway The Arctic elevation dataset run out of the University of Minnesota is no longer being produced
Indigenous organizations that span borders are the ones still able to act region-wide The Inuit Circumpolar Council now holds permanent observer status at the International Maritime Organization
1. Urgency crowds out consent
Mitchell opened by asking how the twin-crisis framing — ecological collapse alongside great-power rivalry — shapes policy and corporate behavior.
Bennett accepted both narratives as accurate and said the damage is in what they license. "So on average, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet." Svalbard, the archipelago between the North Pole and Norway, is warming seven times faster, she said
The ecological instability is compounded by a political fracture: NATO against Russia, NATO enlarged by Sweden and Finland since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Trump administration's designs on Greenland
The cost of treating the region as contested territory falls on the people who live in it. "And I think that does a real disservice to the four million people who live in the region who rely on its lands and resources, its waters and ice, and kind of invites the sense of maybe short-term decision making"
The short-term decisions she named are concrete — investing in a new mine, building new runways — taken without weighing long-term consequences or securing consent from Arctic residents
2. Small groups fill the gap
Bennett rejected the idea that the region is sliding into lawlessness. "So I think any kind of proclamations by the media or what have you that the region is on the verge of anarchy or even armed conflict are certainly sensational."
The Arctic Council, established in 1996, brings together the eight Arctic states and six Indigenous peoples' organizations as permanent participants who must be consulted. Its working groups on environmental issues, science and marine oil-spill pollution still function; high-level cooperation is more or less paused
What has replaced the top layer is coalitions of the willing. Bennett called it "mini lateralism" or "a la carte diplomacy" — groups such as the Nordic states with the UK, or with Canada added, working on the environment, Indigenous wellbeing or science Non-Arctic states are also now working with Arctic states in less usual combinations
One agreement that predates the war still holds every party at the table. The Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, signed in 2018, binds five Arctic coastal states including Russia alongside China, Korea, Japan and the European Union to prohibit commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean. "And under that treaty, all 10 parties continue to meet despite the crisis in the Arctic."
3. 2022 ended exceptionalism
Mitchell asked what killed Arctic exceptionalism — the idea that Arctic states kept the region out of great-power rivalry — and whether the Arctic Council can work with Russia a pariah and China pressing its polar interests.
Bennett dated the end precisely, and it was not the annexation of Crimea. "I think Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was really the straw that broke the camel's back." Cooperation persisted for nearly another decade after Crimea
She and Dodds argue in the book that the signs were there beforehand: Russia turning more aggressive in the region, and NATO already fracturing under the first Trump administration
The worry now runs the other way. The Arctic could become a source of tension for great-power struggles elsewhere, which she said has already happened over Greenland
On China she drew a distinction most coverage does not. The council cannot function as designed while Russia is a pariah, but China's polar interests are not the problem: it has been an observer at the Arctic Council since 2013, and the challenges it presents sit outside Arctic Council governance
4. No exit from the paradox
Mitchell put the Arctic paradox to her — melting ice unlocking the oil, gas and minerals whose extraction accelerates the melting, with Russia funding its war from Arctic energy while Washington pushes a drill-baby-drill policy. In his opening he called it the crisis becoming "the business case."
Bennett said the diagnosis is hers and the cure is not. As an academic she identifies issues, she said, without always having the tools to solve them
She offered no mechanism for breaking the loop, and said so plainly. "I think instead I mostly just wring my hands watching this very phenomenon of the melting ice enabling increased extraction" — from mines in the Canadian north to oil and gas fields ever farther offshore Norway and Russia
The refusal is structural rather than tactical. "So I don't see a way to break this feedback loop within a kind of capitalist extractive global economic system, honestly."
The opening she describes is inviting new extraction rather than prompting governments and companies to slow down and weigh long-term repercussions
5. Russian gas finds buyers
The Russian Arctic is not a new frontier. Extraction goes back decades, much of it to the Soviet Arctic or earlier. What changed is that as the Western Siberian fields dried up, Russia pushed north and offshore
The war raised the urgency and lowered the standards. Russia no longer partners with Western oil and gas companies that could supply technology meeting environmental standards; it now partners with China and, Bennett said, is much less mindful of the standards it once observed
She did not accept the framing that Western imports contradict Western climate commitments, and pointed at the West's own inconsistency instead. "Norway is the world's first country to say it wants to mine its deep seabed"
The real contradiction she named is military, not environmental. The West arms Ukraine against Russia and buys Russian liquefied natural gas at the same time
Sanctions have not stopped the flow. "We have seen the US and the EU and a few Asian countries try and apply sanctions to Russian commodities, and yet those commodities still find a way to market." She called it a cat-and-mouse game "Places like Dubai have become kind of clearinghouses for Russian capital and Russian goods," which she said further complicates the circuits that keep Russian Arctic commodities funding the war
6. Half the Arctic went dark
Mitchell put the scale of the problem to her with the show's own figures, saying Russia controls roughly half the Arctic's landmass and two-thirds of its population, and asked what it means when the largest Arctic state behaves as a black box.
Bennett called it a source of deep concern and said the isolation is worse than the Cold War in some respects. Agreements such as the polar bear treaty brought five Arctic coastal states together mid-Cold War to protect the species
The break is now at the level of individual researchers. "But now, I mean, when I talk to my colleagues, they can barely even get an email back from a former Russian collaborator."
Working at a regional scale stops meaning anything when half the region is missing. "As you say, Russia accounts for half of the Arctic, so what does it even mean to do work at an Arctic scale when you're only working with 50% of the region?"
Remote sensing is not a substitute, and this is her own field. Satellites and remote sensing can gather some observations, she said, but they cannot make up for field-based work on permafrost, carbon or radioactive waste, which can only be measured on the ground
Her conclusion is that people are still coming to terms with the fact that the Arctic is no longer manageable at a circumpolar scale
7. China builds the sensors
China has no territorial sovereignty in the Arctic, and Bennett said that is the basis for dismissing its "near Arctic state" label. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others said, in her account, "Yeah, it doesn't mean anything that China's 900 miles from the Arctic."
The access it does have is legal, and it is using all of it. The global commons, Russia, and the research station it runs on Svalbard as a beneficiary of the Svalbard Treaty
What she said is being missed is the technology, not the territory. China is fusing together technologies that gather observations across the domains it calls its "strategic new frontiers" — underwater, in orbit, and across both polar regions, since it is active in Antarctica too
The capability that would matter is detection. "China may begin outpacing the US when it comes to, let's say, detection of submarines underwater or other sorts of deep sea to outer space communication." She noted the US Department of Defense's term for China, a "pacing threat"
8. Politics limits the route
Mitchell asked about the Northern Sea Route becoming navigable because of climate change, and whether anyone can regulate Arctic shipping before it scales.
Bennett corrected the premise before answering it. "I would add a little bit of a correction, which is that the Northern Sea Route has been used by Russia and previously the Soviet Union for close to a century." Go back hundreds of years and there was shipping along its western side
What climate change changes is the calendar, not the existence of the route. It is extending the shipping season and making year-round sailing from Russia to Asia possible, she said
The brake on Arctic shipping is geopolitical, and it is the part she said people forget. China paused its own shipping along the Northern Sea Route for a while and has since resumed, while Japanese and Korean vessels are not exactly coming through. She would not call it a silver lining, but it is a reason the traffic may not suddenly accelerate
Regulation exists and is being followed. The International Maritime Organization's Polar Code, instituted in 2014, covers both Arctic and Antarctic waters, and she believes Russia and the other Arctic states are adhering to it, on rules running from heavy fuel oil to the ballast that can be brought into the region
9. The US can already build
Mitchell asked how much of the interest in Greenland is about resources and how much about strategic geography, and whether this moment differs from the US dependence on Greenlandic cryolite in the Second World War.
The historical precedent is real and old. Bennett traced US interest back to 1867, the year the US bought Alaska from the Russian Empire, with Greenland the eastward version of the same expansion and Iceland briefly considered
She does not think the present interest is strategic calculation. "I think I would chalk up the Trump administration's interest to simply what Klaus Dodds, he calls ego politics." Her reading is that Trump wants a real-estate deal that would expand American territory by the largest amount in decades if not centuries, which makes the interest irrational rather than security-driven
The strongest evidence is that nothing is being blocked. The US has run military bases in Greenland since the 1940s and 1950s, and a standing defense agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark already allows it to build more. "So Greenland is essential to US security, but the US already has the right to do more if it wants."
The same is true commercially. "There's also no prohibitions against US companies investing in Greenlandic mineral deposits."
10. Greenlanders say no to US
Mitchell noted that while Washington raises fears of Russian and Chinese ships near Greenland, Greenlanders are more alarmed by American ones, and asked what gets lost.
What gets lost is that Greenland has its own politics, and Bennett said that is now surfacing. "I think what typically has gotten lost in these conversations, but which I think positively is now surfacing, is the fact that Greenland is an island populated by 57,000 people who have the right and the desire to determine their own future."
A large share of Greenlanders gathered in the streets of Nuuk in January to protest what the US was doing, which she read as a show of strength; Greenlandic leaders have since held their own against the world's largest superpower
The polling is not close. "So I think when it comes to what Greenlanders want, the polls show that I think well over 80, if not close to 90% of Greenlanders do not want to join the US." Many want independence eventually, but slowly and steadily
The immediate effect of American pressure has been the opposite of American intent. "I think the crisis with the US has actually pushed Greenland closer to Denmark for the time being."
She said a diplomatic corps that small is overburdened by being pulled toward the EU, China and the US at once, and that Greenlanders want to design their own position in international relations rather than have it assigned to them
11. Polar science is leaving
Mitchell, who has run earlier episodes on US budget cuts to scientific data sets, asked what the cuts are doing to Arctic data and whether anyone else can fill the gap.
Bennett's assessment was unqualified. "I think that US budget cuts to polar science in both the Arctic and Antarctic are absolutely devastating." The US has long been the largest producer of polar research
China can add capacity but not the same public good. It is catching up, she said, but is not known for producing publicly available Arctic data sets, from satellite imagery or otherwise, in a form that is legible and easy for researchers elsewhere to use
The losses are specific. The Arctic Digital Elevation Model, a high-resolution topographic data set maintained for years out of the University of Minnesota, is no longer being produced, and numerous satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may lose funding
The pipeline is closing before the current grants run out. "My colleagues here at the University of Washington have spoken about how there's really basically no NASA funding that's related to the Arctic to apply for." Existing grants are still running; what comes next is the question
Graduate students are the first casualty, and the effect compounds. They are not being admitted, and are going to Europe, the UK and Canada instead, which she said produces a "brain drain" in polar scientific talent
Asked whether the shift has already happened, she said it has, within 12 months. Graduate students from the UK and France have turned down funded US postdoctoral positions over the state of US politics and the administration's attitude to international students and workers; funded posts are being left vacant; US colleagues have been recruited by institutions in Canada and France; Norway is funding a large Arctic Ocean research effort. "But I do feel that people are leaving and looking for opportunities abroad and not necessarily ever planning to come back."
12. The military is building
Mitchell asked who is building the new shipping lanes, roads and ports, who benefits, and whether Arctic development can avoid repeating the extractive pattern.
The money is not following the ice, it is following the threat. "I think what's actually evident is that right now it's militarization that is really driving investment in Arctic infrastructure" — new runways, new spaceports in northern Norway and Sweden, and a port at Nome, Alaska that had been off and on for years The trigger she named is the Russian threat, a US that appears to be withdrawing, and European states bolstering their own security
She is unconvinced by the dual-use case being made for these projects. "I tend to be a little bit sceptical of this idea of dual use because ultimately a big ticket project is only going to be built in the Arctic, if there's a real benefactor like the military or an extractive company." The civilian part of such a plan, she said, can be decoration on the blueprint that is never actually built
Consultation has improved for exercises and not for construction. Sámi people in the Nordic countries have told her the military forewarns them about training exercises. The bigger complaint is that infrastructure decisions are still not run by them — a windmill or a runway is close to a done deal before consultation begins, and unlike a weekend exercise it is permanent
The bill arrives after the cycle turns. "And at the end of the day, I mean this period of militarization will ultimately end, everything is a cycle and yet the kind of long-term ecological and societal impacts of infrastructure that one day may well be obsolete will be left for local people to deal with and pick up the pieces." She said there is no clear plan yet for those toxic legacies
13. Locals want to decide
Bennett rejected both stock portrayals of Arctic communities — victims of climate change, or obstacles to development. Alaska Native, Canadian Inuit and other Indigenous organizations have spent 60 years securing rights and autonomy from their national governments
On Alaska's North Slope, local Alaska Native organizations champion oil and gas extraction rather than resisting it. "They're not interested in being so-called conservation refugees." The gains are direct — tax revenue that supports local schools, or a basketball team
The point is agency, not a position on drilling. "So not everyone on Alaska's North Slope will be in favour of oil and gas extraction, but ultimately they just don't want their fates to be decided by the outside."
She tied it back to Greenland. "I think Indigenous peoples across the Arctic would generally emphasise that they don't want to be stuck in time." Indigenous leaders speaking for their own communities is what undoes the assumption that they are passive
14. The levers are local
Mitchell asked, in his final question, where the realistic leverage points are and who is positioned to pull them.
Bennett noted a reviewer had asked the same thing. A review of Unfrozen in Asia Policy asked why she and Dodds had not offered more recommendations; her answer is that she diagnoses rather than prescribes, but she wants to be better at offering interventions
The pan-Arctic layer is not where anything will happen. "So I do think that pan-Arctic regional cooperation is kind of completely sidelined at the moment."
The first lever is sub-regional groupings of states. The Nordic countries, Canada, the UK and the European Union with its own Arctic states and partners such as Norway, acting on climate change or on recommendations for critical-mineral extraction and mineral supply chains
The second is Indigenous organizations, because their populations already cross the borders. The Inuit Circumpolar Council represents Inuit in four countries — the US in Alaska, Russia in Chukotka, Canada, and Greenland. "And that organisation actually recently became the first Indigenous organisation to hold a kind of permanent membership as an observer in the International Maritime Organisation."
Her argument for these actors is that they can act when national governments will not. They challenge the primacy of national governments at a moment when national security dominates the agenda, and they are a reminder that cross-border problems still need someone working across the borders
Bonus Insights
Mitchell said the Arctic has been a running theme on the show for more than seven years, beginning with a conversation with the Royal United Services Institute on climate change and the strategic militarization of the region
He has also devoted several earlier episodes to the effect of US budget cuts on scientific data sets, with guests including NOAA's former chief scientist Sarah Kapnick and the Singapore Earth Observatory's Benjamin Horton
Bennett's own research spans the Arctic and orbital space, and she said China's activity should be read across both — the country treats underwater, polar and outer-space domains as one set of "strategic new frontiers"
Bennett's bottom line is that the Arctic can no longer be governed or even measured as a single region, and the work that still gets done will be done by smaller groups of states and by Indigenous organizations that already operate across the borders.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Arctic Council (The intergovernmental body established in 1996 with eight member states and six Indigenous peoples' organizations; its working groups still function while high-level cooperation is paused)
The Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement (Signed in 2018 by five Arctic coastal states plus China, Korea, Japan and the EU; all 10 parties still meet, which Bennett offered as the model that survived the war)
NATO (Enlarged by Sweden and Finland after the invasion of Ukraine, and the framing Bennett said now sits over everything in the region)
The International Maritime Organization and its Polar Code (The 2014 rules covering Arctic and Antarctic shipping, from heavy fuel oil to ballast, which Bennett believes Russia and the other Arctic states are following)
The Inuit Circumpolar Council (Represents Inuit in four countries and recently became the first Indigenous organization to hold permanent observer status at the IMO)
The University of Washington (Bennett's department, and her source for the claim that there is essentially no Arctic-related NASA funding left to apply for)
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (The two US funders whose Arctic programs are shrinking — no Arctic grants to apply for at one, satellites that may lose funding at the other)
The US Department of Defense (Source of the "pacing threat" description of China that Bennett applied to its polar and undersea sensing work)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic – Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds (The book the interview is built on, and the source of the argument that Arctic exceptionalism is over)
Cryopolitics (The Arctic news and analysis site Bennett founded and edits)
ArcticDEM (The high-resolution Arctic topographic data set maintained out of the University of Minnesota that Bennett said is no longer being produced)
Asia Policy (Published a review of Unfrozen asking why the authors had not offered more policy recommendations)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone who has to have a view on this.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: