A Brief History of the Arctic Council

Immediately after the end of the Cold War, the Arctic states launched the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, which ultimately became part of the Arctic Council created in 1996. The Council was deliberately established by means of a non-binding declaration (the “Ottawa Declaration”Footnote ¹ ), on the rationale that a declaration would provide a more flexible format for advancing environmental protection and sustainable development than a conventional intergovernmental organization endowed with legally binding decision-making powers.Footnote ² The non-binding format also facilitated the active inclusion in the Council of six groups representing Arctic Indigenous Peoples.

The Council’s operations quickly became more ambitious. It soon produced significant large-scale scientific assessments and normative guidelines on various topics, such as the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact AssessmentFootnote ³ and the 2009 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment.Footnote ⁴

Although the Council lacked the authority to make binding decisions, it nevertheless served as the venue for the negotiation of three treaties among the eight Arctic states. The first of these treatiesFootnote ⁵ concerned the need to improve search and rescue capabilities in the face of increasing human activity in the Arctic. Through this agreement, the parties committed to undertake joint training and exercises, to share information, and to assist each other in responding to search and rescue incidents. The second treaty,Footnote ⁶ on marine oil pollution, took a similar approach—the parties agreed to a range of commitments to cooperate in preparing for, and responding to, oil spills in the Arctic.

The last of these treaties,Footnote ⁷ on enhancing scientific cooperation, has a somewhat different character. Its purpose is to improve the prospects for scientists to undertake research across jurisdictional lines in the Arctic and, in particular, to allow scientists from outside Russia to gain greater access to Russian territory and ocean areas.

One notable feature of the Council is the manner in which it engages the Arctic region’s Indigenous Peoples—the original inhabitants of the region—in its operations. Although the Ottawa Declaration stipulates that decisions are made only by the eight governments, in practice the Council has generally sought to secure the assent to all substantive decisions by all six “Permanent Participant” organizations representing the region’s Indigenous Peoples.Footnote ⁸ The Council has also granted observer status to a growing number of non-Arctic states, as well as intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. Currently, there are thirty-eight observers to the Council, of which thirteen are non-Arctic states. As Arctic issues have attracted increasing attention, these observers seek to use their status to influence Arctic policy.

The Rise and Fall of Arctic Exceptionalism

The Russian efforts to annex Crimea in 2014 certainly increased geopolitical tensions between Russia and the Western Arctic states, which threatened to undermine cooperative relations within the Arctic Council. Canada, which was chairing the Council at the time, proposed to suspend Russian membership, but other Council members argued that it was more important to remain engaged constructively with Russia on Arctic issues.

Indeed, in the years immediately following the purported annexation of Crimea, Arctic cooperation generally deepened. The International Maritime Organization, prompted by the Arctic states, produced a set of binding measures to strengthen safety and environmental standards for shipping in the Arctic, known as the Polar Code, which entered into force in 2017.Footnote ⁹ That same year, the Arctic states signed the Science Cooperation agreement noted above. The Arctic states also created the Arctic Economic CouncilFootnote ¹⁰ and the Arctic Coast Guard ForumFootnote ¹¹ to facilitate additional forms of cooperation in the region.

Finally, six of the Arctic states (Canada, Denmark on behalf of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and the United States) joined with four non-Arctic states (China, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union) to conclude a treaty on Arctic fisheries.Footnote ¹² This treaty established a moratorium on commercial fishing in the large high seas area of the Central Arctic Ocean—a prospect made possible by the dramatic warming of the Arctic and the resulting diminishment of Arctic sea ice—and committed the parties to a joint scientific program to assess the possibilities for allowing limited fishing to commence on a sustainable basis in the area if and when the moratorium is lifted.

All of these developments—the expanding scope of the Arctic Council, the conclusion of five binding agreements, and the creation of additional governance mechanisms for the Arctic—led to a growing narrative concerning the phenomenon of “Arctic exceptionalism,” which might be defined as the willingness of governments to set aside their differences concerning other regions and other issues in favor of pursuing mutual interests in the Arctic through diplomatic cooperation and engagement. Despite friction with Russia, the ongoing conflict in Syria, evidence of Russian election interference in the United States, and other sources of tension, the Western Arctic states chose to “compartmentalize” the Arctic—that is, to continue collaborative work with Russia to address the effects of climate change and other common problems in the region.

During this period, the Arctic Council was generally considered the centerpiece of Arctic cooperation. States heralded the Council as the “pre-eminent forum” through which to advance their mutual interests in the region, and governments in other regions advanced proposals for creating similar bodies. As a testament to its success in promoting cooperative engagement amid challenging geopolitical times, the Arctic Council was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on several occasions, including in the period immediately preceding Russia’s 2022 military actions in Ukraine.Footnote ¹³

All this came to an abrupt halt when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The seven western Arctic states promptly suspended their activities in the Council, which was at the time chaired by Russia.Footnote ¹⁴ This effectively brought most work of the Council to a standstill for more than a year. Norway assumed the Council chair from May 2023 and managed to restart the functioning of the Council in limited ways. Beginning in the spring of 2024, it was possible to resume the technical work in the Council’s working groups, but only through virtual meetings. Nevertheless, since 2022, the Arctic Council has not met at the level of ministers, nor has it even convened meetings among the “senior Arctic officials”—the diplomats with responsibility for leading the work of the Council on a day-to-day basis. While virtual meetings among all eight governments were held in 2023 and 2025 to effect the transfer of the Arctic Council chairship (first to Norway and then Denmark) and to approve ongoing projects and new workplans for the next two-year period, these meetings were a far cry from the high-level events that produced the political gravity the Council enjoyed in the past, when foreign ministers from all Arctic states convened every two years under Arctic Council auspices.

Current Challenges and Possibilities

The Council’s principal contemporary challenge stems from the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has with few exceptions severed Russian-Western relations in general and within the Arctic in particular. As noted above, political-level cooperation through the Council has not occurred since 2022, and work in the Working Groups has continued largely via virtual channels.

Despite these constraints, the Council’s Working Groups have advanced technical cooperation in a number of fields. For example, the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME) Working Group produced a record number of reports and other deliverables for the May 2025 Tromsø meeting that concluded the Norwegian chairship of the Council. It should be noted, however, that these projects had been under development since the Council’s 2021 Reykjavik ministerial meeting; thus, a substantial number of PAME-driven outputs were already in the pipeline.

The Working Group on Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR) has also continued to carry out a range of worthwhile projects and activities despite current restrictions. Among other things, EPPR plays a significant role in the implementation of both the Arctic Search and Rescue Agreement and the Arctic Marine Oil Pollution Agreement by facilitating data exchange and other forms of communication among the parties.

Notwithstanding these ongoing efforts, the inability of the Council to meet at the political level has created profound uncertainty over its future. The 2021 ministerial meeting in Reykjavik was the last such gathering at which the Arctic states could fully commit to various initiatives to be undertaken by the Council’s Working Groups. Although the Arctic states agreed to a substantial portfolio of projects at the 2025 Arctic Council meeting in Tromsø,Footnote ¹⁵ the ambition level of these initiatives is not as high as that observed in earlier periods.

The advent of the second Trump administration has also cast a considerable pall over the Council and its work. The Trump administration has undermined the very strong unity that the Western front had after the Ukraine invasion. President Trump has also repeatedly and aggressively argued that the United States should acquire Greenland and that Canada should become the fifty-first state of the United States, creating serious backlash. In addition, President Trump has sought to engage with Russia in ways that the other Arctic nations do not necessarily support, further increasing uncertainty over what is taking place in the Arctic.

The second Trump administration has also advanced climate policies and values that are directly at odds with those of other Western Arctic nations. The United States has again withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement and is pursuing policies likely to make climate change in the Arctic (and elsewhere) worse. This will complicate much of the work of the Council’s Working Groups, which involves monitoring the effects of Arctic climate change and seeking to adapt to the profound changes that climate change is already having on the region.

At the 2025 Tromsø meeting, the U.S. delegation objected to the use of the term “climate change,” arguing instead for such euphemisms as “the Arctic environment” and “the changing Arctic.”Footnote ¹⁶ This does not imply that all of the Council’s climate-related work has ceased; the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme Working Group is pursuing several ongoing projects related to climate change. Technical-level cooperation also remains active in climate change science, and the Council’s other working groups have continued to advance projects directly or indirectly related to climate change. However, given that the Council is currently unable to function at the political level, it seems unlikely that it will launch any ambitious initiatives to facilitate climate mitigation or adaptation.

More broadly, the approach of the second Trump administration to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy focuses mostly on bilateral and transactional relations. In the Arctic, successful diplomacy has for several decades depended primarily on multilateral, cooperative relations and on the development and maintenance of long-term relationships among government and Indigenous representatives, civil society and other stakeholders.