Australia’s complacent, reactive posture towards the polar regions is no longer tenable.
Canberra cannot continue treating the poles as peripheral scientific domains best managed through diplomacy. Strategic competition in the polar regions should be viewed as a single broader power contest. Sharpened geopolitical rivalries at the ends of the earth are helping to shape the contours of our emerging international order.
My new ASPI report, Polar security: Strategic competition at the ends of the Earth, explores these issues.
The polar contest that’s now well underway has three key drivers. The first is resource insecurity. The Arctic and Antarctica hold immense hydrocarbon and critical mineral wealth. In the Arctic, most discovered resources fall within the well delimitated areas of Arctic littoral states.
Potential resources beneath the North Pole, within the Central Arctic Ocean, are subject to an ongoing legal arbitration process between Denmark, Russia and Canada in the United Nations’ Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The notion of a widespread great game for Arctic bounty is certainly overegged, at least, for now.
Antarctic resources are, for now, out of bounds in commercial production terms, thanks to the Antarctic Treaty System. The treaty itself sets aside debate over sovereignty of the continent in favour of international cooperation in research and environmental protection.
The 1991 Madrid Protocol is an additional layer of protection for Antarctica’s resource wealth, prohibiting mining and exploitation until at least 2048. A complex process of negotiations, requiring consensus among parties to the protocol could conceivably enable some regulated mineral extraction activity. This assumes energy-hungry or technically capable nations choose to wait until 2048, are still interested in collective engagement in Antarctica and feel constrained by international law.
The second driver is renewed strategic competition in the international system. Russia has remilitarised her vast Arctic coastline to protect what it calls its future resource economic base. In Antarctica, both Russia and China are redeveloping old stations and building new ones, at a remarkable pace. Advanced technologies enable polar research activities to blur the line between research and military application.
These so called dual-use capabilities (including satellite support infrastructure, drones and sensors) support collaborative research endeavours. But they clearly have military and intelligence value, in the future, if not now, and all without violating explicit demilitarisation Antarctic Treaty terms.
India joins Russia and China as a leading power in the polar regions. All three work to sustain permanent infrastructure, invest in operational experience on the ice and fund new capabilities there. Strategic competition seems to play out in the poles under the cover of benign science. States stretch and test norms via scientific research framing while accumulating strategic advantages in influence across governance forums and future resource leverage through early physical positioning.
A third driver compounds resource insecurity and a simmering strategic competition: environmental change. Acting as an accelerator for strategic competition, environmental change is melting the polar icecaps. Sea-ice decline has resulted in longer annual periods for east-west shipping through the Arctic. Thinning of summer ice has also enabled commercial assessments of viability for previously unviable resource projects to be reconsidered.
In Antarctica, ice-sheet melt is contributing to global sea-levels in a way that could directly threaten many coastal cities. Melting of fresh water further damages ocean ecosystems, affecting fisheries and global food security chains.
Environmental change at the poles is simply compressing our decision timelines to act on polar interests. Overnight, the polar regions have become strategic frontiers. Russia, China, and India are three nations that appear to recognise this.
Australia’s response to these three major forces reshaping the polar regions remains narrowly focused on Antarctica. We continue to celebrate our Antarctic history while relying on the limited tools of treaty compliance and annual closed-door diplomatic meetings that, year after year, end in stalemate.
Canberra must develop a cohesive plan rather than relying on old assumptions of indefinite cooperation. A national polar strategy, supported by a dedicated polar ambassador, would align Australia with the many partners and allies that are already moving in this direction.
An Australian polar strategy should prioritise friend-shoring to pool scarce assets, from icebreakers to domain awareness technologies, for collective advantage. Membership in the US-led Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, must be treated as an immediate priority. This trilateral pact between the US, Canada and Finland is focused on designing and building polar icebreakers by pooling resources and industrial capacity to surge capabilities.
The assumption that the Arctic and Antarctica remain insulated zones of Cold War-era cooperation is being overtaken by the converging trinity of resource insecurity, renewed strategic competition and environmental change.
Neither Australia’s historical polar legacy nor its scientific leadership, trusted goodwill and continued quiet diplomacy will be enough to absorb the shocks of generational changes underway in the international system. Canberra must get moving.
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