Toward Just, Ethical and Sustainable Arctic Economies, Environments and Societies

Project Information

JUSTNORTH

Grant agreement ID: 869327

DOI

10.3030/869327

Project closed

EC signature date 21 April 2020

Start date 1 June 2020

End date 30 November 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials

Total cost

€ 6 156 494,25

EU contribution

€ 5 999 994,25

Coordinated by

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - JUSTNORTH (Toward Just, Ethical and Sustainable Arctic Economies, Environments and Societies)

Reporting period: 2022-12-01 to 2023-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

We are often reminded that climate change is happening and that climate action--adaptation and mitigation is urgent. This means consuming and polluting less and recycling more. Some of the obvious 'easy' solutions for how to make this happen include changing how energy is produced, eating different sources of protein and reducing transport distance.

In the EU and EEA, this transformation requires new sources of minerals and raw materials, improved transport and port infrastructure, diversifying energy production and other types of innovation, investment and development. The needed resources are found in the Arctic and it is assumed that there is space here to build. However, the Arctic is not empty and this region has its own history of economic development, environmental harms and colonial practices.

If Arctic development is to be sustainable development, decision-makers need to make justice in the distribution of goods and harms, procedures in planning and recognition of Indigenous rights as the foundation for any future development. This is the question that JUSTNORTH addressed: how can we make development in the Arctic just and sustainable?

JUSTNORTH brought together institutional partners from around the circumpolar Arctic and recognised scholars with expertise in Arctic studies to study how the EU can pursue its ambitions toward meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and the needs of a secure Europe.

The project operated from the fundamental premise that an economic activity cannot be sustainable if it is ethically flawed. If economic development in the Arctic is to be 'viable' it must also be just for the people and environment that it affects. Often evaluations of economic viability are incompatible with the goals of sustainability because they compromise the economic, environmental and social well-being of future generations.

To support finding answers to this problem, JUSTNORTH's objectives included:

1. Identifying ethics and value systems of actors engaged in key economic activities in the region, creating high societal, environmental, and economic impacts and risks.
2. Advancing knowledge of how these ethics and value systems shape these economic activities and people’s views on how these activities impact their lives.
3. Developing tools, mechanisms, and frameworks for more equitable and just assessments and negotiations and proposed legal and regulatory pathways for implementing them.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

JUSTNORTH began in June 2020 during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, making a bold decision to not postpone the project's start date. JUSTNORTH activities largely went as planned despite the ebbs and flows of the ongoing global pandemic, although many activities have been reconfigured through e-technologies--from team meetings to co-production and fieldwork. At present, all tasks and research teams are on schedule, submitting all deliverables on time.

The first major achievement of the project is in the work produced by the 'justice theory' team from the starting work package (WP1), preparing justice and ethics guidelines to be used by the rest of the project. This includes a justice handbook for the case study researchers, as well as materials that will help the integration team develop the JUSTscore negotiation tool and the legal scholars produce the recommendations to the EU for their next Arctic policy. The team has produced the JUSTNORTH Justice database, a literature database of scholarly works on justice and ethics (10.5281/zenodo.7254104) a JUSTNORTH Justice Podcast Series (10.5281/zenodo.7561807) and several publications on justice and the Arctic, including chapters in the edited volume Arctic Justice: Society, Environment and Governance (ISBN 978-1529224801)

The next major achievement is the completion of the 17 case studies (WP2-4) that studied existing economic activities in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Russia to identify the barriers, risks and costs of economic development and the benefits, opportunities and pathways toward just sustainable development. The case studies produced a strong set of data and results to be used by the integration team (WP5) in the development of the project's key deliverable, the negotiation tool JUSTscore. The case study results are also being used to inform recommendations for policy and decision-makers developed in WP6. While the fieldwork and early-stage analysis is finished, publications from this part of the project are just starting to emerge.

Some final achievement emerging in the last part of the project included a serious of policy and economic briefs related to Arctic policy, JUSTscore--a negotiation tool and finally, a project documentary.

JUSTNORTH is emerged as a collective research unit with established collaboration with other EU initiatives such as Polar Cluster and EU Polar Net, and the project leadership worked closely with these groups to maximise impact and exploitation of project outcomes, which are being shared via the project's website and stored for the long term in Zenodo.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

JUSTNORTH filled an important gap in Arctic research by bringing ethics and justice to evaluations of viability in economic development. JUSTNORTH was the first EU programme to address sustainable economic development together with principles of justice for the Arctic region. JUSTNORTH outcomes are the result of the team's co-production with Arctic stakeholders and bring a comprehensive assessment of stakeholder perspectives to EU and national policy-making in, and for, the Arctic. In this way, JUSTNORTH brought policy-relevant knowledge to the impact sought by the European Commission for the EU Integrated Arctic Policy.

Another way the project brought value to decision-making for economic development through the project's negotiation tool, JUSTscore. JUSTscore is developed on a foundation of values and by reconciling the different value systems that exist between the different stakeholders to Arctic development. The tool will make it possible for parties in economic development projects to understand the impact of proposed investments and developments from the perspectives of other stakeholders who will be impacted by the plans in different ways. Most importantly, JUSTscore will enable the different stakeholders to understand how the economic development project achieves, or often, how it fails to achieve just results and maintain sustainability standards.

With sustainable development and climate adaptation among the most pressing needs of this generation, JUSTNORTH brought critical perspectives on the socio-economic impact of economic development. A final result of the project includes a documentary film that visualises the impact of and responses to Arctic economic activities in the locations of the project's 17 case studies, including Greenland, Nunavut, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. The documentary shares local voices in their perspectives of sustainability and Arctic economic development, perspectives which will be shared with the general public. It is hoped that this causes a wider audience to understand the impacts of the economic development happening in the Arctic, development that improves the standards of living elsewhere for people across Europe.

Mining infrastructure in Sulitjelma Norway by Gustav Sigeman

Bridge over Finland-Sweden Border at Tornio River by Corine Wood-Donnelly