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Ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe.
The Arctic is becoming dangerously destabilized.
This is true in a literal sense. The north’s precipitous loss in glacial ice sheets, permafrost, and sea ice will have global ripple effects. Should the “Earth’s air conditioner” become perennially iceless, as scientists fear could happen as early as 2050, the fallout has the power to trigger worst-case scenarios around the world: Sea levels could rise in New York City, monsoon rains could swamp Lagos, Nigeria, and precious forest cover in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, could dwindle to nubs. Each glacier that collapses is another tick of the time-bomb.
But it’s also true in a more metaphorical sense: Arctic ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe: Russia.
The Kremlin controls 50 percent of the Arctic coastline. But isolated from the other countries encircling the North Pole due to its war of aggression in Ukraine, Russia has retreated from any sort of Arctic cooperation. That has left experts fearful not only of scientists’ ability to stay on top of the impacts of climate change, but also that the warming region might give Russian President Vladimir Putin a pretext to break more international rules.
For the last 15 years, Russia has jockeyed for Arctic control — from aggressively building its military capabilities, to scaling up its shipping capacity, to even unlawfully planting a flag along the North Pole seabed and claiming the land as its own. But it was still hemmed in by the Arctic’s web of laws and accords.
These laws, unfortunately, are quite vulnerable to ice melt.
Maritime claims, upheld by entities like the International Maritime Organization, for example, are one way for states to protest rule-breaking in the region. But melting sea ice has opened up previously frozen zones, threatening to undermine laws like Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which gives coastal states special rights to ice covered areas. “If the ice melts, do you still have that legal basis?” said Rebecca Pincus, the director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center.
Valuable shipping lanes are also emerging in the north, encouraging Russia to further engage in a two-fold strategy: mass resource extraction to underpin its national wealth and taking “the most extreme position possible on its right to control all foreign navigation through the internal waters of the [Northern Sea Route],” as Cornell Overfield wrote recently in Foreign Policy. However, this state of affairs might not last long. “As sea ice continues to retreat in the Arctic, it will become possible for ships to navigate outside of the Russian zone through the central Arctic Ocean and bypass the Russian coastline entirely,” Pincus said. “That will shift the balance of the, I guess you could say, ‘power’ to a certain extent.”
These central Arctic Ocean shipping routes will not be open for decades and pose a number of operational challenges along the way, she explained. But when they do, it would allow ships to navigate outside Russian waters, reducing the potency of Russia’s de facto control along the Northern Sea Route, further isolating a country that sees the icy region as a part of its power projection.
Meanwhile, Russia is essentially alone among its neighbors.
Mathieu Boulègue, a consulting fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, told me a bifurcation is emerging in the north, where a singled-out Russia has recused itself from the Nordic-North American camp — a once-staid Arctic 8 now made into an awkward, asterisked Arctic 7. With Finland having joined NATO this month, and Sweden close behind, Russia might see itself as not just alone, but surrounded. Experts fear that spells trouble.
“More human activity and more military activity will lead to more accidents, more incidents, more miscalculation, and therefore more tension,” said Boulègue. “Now that the signs are on the wall, we can't really ignore them anymore.”
The United States and other countries rimming the Arctic are carefully initiating exploratory military exercises in the region to see how they can navigate safely and effectively in newly-melted territories. Because of how remote the Arctic is, accidents and emergencies are exponentially harder and more expensive to triage. The latest U.S. Arctic strategy promises to increase its military presence there, too, in order to keep pace with the Russian military presence. But experts warn that neither technology nor policy in a territorially hostile area could keep up with the speed of these melting passages. Indeed, they say it would take the West at least 10 years to catch up with Russia’s military in the region. This opens up dangers for Russia to do just about anything it’d like to, including seizing new territory and setting up military bases in contested areas.
“We're seeing some pretty aggressive, unprofessional, and unsafe behavior by the Russian military in regards to American military assets [in the Arctic],” said the Wilson Center’s Pincus. “Think about that level of risk-taking and aggression on the part of the Russian military and now extrapolate that to, for example, a naval exercise that is contesting Russian claims to waters in the Arctic. That gives me pause and argues for great care.”
Beyond the threat of Russia’s mounting military capabilities in the region, Arctic cooperation has also suffered more generally from Russia’s absence. The Arctic Council is a Nobel Prize-nominated diplomatic forum that convenes the Arctic 8, six non-Arctic states, and a cadre of non-governmental observers which include Arctic Indigenous communities. This preeminent intergovernmental venue had to suspend all of its programming after the start of the war in Ukraine. It has only picked up projects since June of last year that do not require cooperation with Russia. Norway is set to assume the chair of this forum come May, but will have to tread delicately if it means to keep Russia within the Council’s orbit.
“The accession by Finland and Sweden to NATO will strengthen security and stability in Northern Europe, including in the Arctic. While security related aspects will understandably become more important, we must ensure that we do not lose sight of the broader issues in Arctic cooperation,” said Finnish Ambassadors Petteri Vuorimäki and Anne Mutanen in a statement to Heatmap.
These so-called broader issues not only impact high-level powers in the Arctic, but also those who are native to the region. Today, six Arctic Indigenous NGOs hold a non-voting status in the Arctic Council, making it one of the world’s only multilateral forums where national government officials sit at the same table as Native leaders.
Many of the six Arctic Indigenous communities who participate in the Arctic Council have ancestral lands that extend into Russia. Leaders among the Indigenous Saami people, for instance, fear that while Arctic states are busy ironing out tension spurred by Russia and its war, their priorities — from phasing out ecologically harmful heavy fuel oil, to prioritizing climate-resilient infrastructure, to recognizing land rights agreements which enable important climate science research, to triaging the potential displacement of Indigenous communities amid coastal erosion and sea ice melt — may take a back seat. “It's not said straight; it's a feeling underlying there that they have more important things to deal with,” said Gunn Britt-Retter, head of the Arctic Environment Unit of the Saami Council, which represents the Saami people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia.
And then there’s another way Russian isolation is punishing the world: science. The world’s leading scientists desperately need access to this corner of the world to establish what they call a “ground truthing,” — basically an up-close understanding of what they’re only seeing now via satellites.
As Tim Lydon warned in The Atlantic last April, “cooperation with Russian scientists has ground to a halt.” Things haven’t improved over the past year. In February, French scientist Jérôme Chappellaz told the Arctic Institute that Russia’s absence from the international scientific community has led to an “environmental emergency.” Field sites have been cut off, data can’t be shared among climate experts based elsewhere, and scientific endeavors have been significantly scaled down.
Russian isolation is being felt everywhere in the Arctic. With global shipping, climate science, international cooperation, and adversarial militaries involved, the rest of the world might also feel the repercussions if something doesn’t change soon.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.