By: Janet Holmén // editor
Since the end of the Second World War, western Europe has enjoyed peace and prosperity. Life here has felt predictable. The strategic alliances that took shape after the War endured. Our international agreements were largely respected. Free trade allowed small countries like Norway to specialise, building on their strengths while relying on others for goods and services they could not produce themselves. This was the world in which the Fram Centre was conceived, grew, and thrived.
Such confidence now feels as though it belongs to another era.
Many democracies have shifted toward autocracy in recent years, with authoritarians on every continent but Antarctica strengthening their influence. Every week brings new outrages: drones and missiles pummel civilian homes and infrastructure in Ukraine; power struggles in Gaza and South Sudan drive millions of people from one refugee camp to another; thousands of protesters are killed in Iran; poorly trained paramilitary forces are deployed to American cities in search of people who can be expelled from the country to meet an arbitrary deportation quota. No wonder the evening news leaves us feeling overwhelmed.
What does a changing world order mean for the Fram Centre?
For years, the Arctic has been remarkably free from geopolitical tensions. Arctic research, environmental protection, and emergency preparedness were coordinated among the circumpolar nations, largely thanks to the efforts of the Arctic Council. Now, however, two post-war ideals—territorial sovereignty and peaceful settlement of disputes through negotiation—are being rejected in favour of brute force. And Greenland lies squarely at the cross-section of those two ideals. The president of the United States argues that his country “need[s] Greenland for national security and international security” and “will go as far as we have to go” to get it. If the High North becomes a region of conflict and restrictions rather than cooperation and openness, it will be considerably more difficult for Fram Centre institutes to conduct research there.
Nor is this the only potential threat. Environmental research suffered when Russia was isolated after its invasion of Ukraine; Western scientists effectively lost access to data from half of the Arctic. Now other important sources of data are at risk because environmental research in the United States is being hamstrung.
American research organisations such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provide data that are crucial to global environmental monitoring. But the current agenda in Washington calls for environmental research to be defunded, projects cancelled, and scientists fired. Several US websites that summarised and presented research findings in readily accessible form have been taken offline, and there is growing fear that decades worth of painstakingly collected data may be deleted from databases. In view of this threat, researchers at the Fram Centre and other organisations in Europe are downloading data potentially at risk, and archiving them in databases outside US control.
In addition to safeguarding historic data, European research institutes would be wise to cultivate collaborative networks, both between and within countries, to increase their own research capacity. The European Space Agency is one obvious platform, already used to support remote sensing. Major EU grants could help ensure predictable funding. Arctic research entities could approach their counterparts in other nations with interests in the Arctic, actively searching for common ground on which to build specific research programmes. This will not be easy, but may be necessary.
So far, the Fram Centre collaboration remains strong, as is clear from this issue of Fram Forum. And we already implement some of the strategies sketched above. See for example the article about the International Kongsfjorden Year (p 76), which gathered research talent from fifteen institutes in seven countries. Another example is the recently launched Arctic Ocean 2050 project (p 160), which will be carried out by a broad consortium of eighteen Norwegian research institutes and universities.
In an unpredictable world, small players must adapt to survive. We need to keep all our options open. We need innovation. And we need diversity—diversity of thought, of skills, of supply chains, and of relationships.
Clearly, we face a period of uncertainty and international volatility. But one thing is certain: the Fram Centre intends to remain a beacon for accessible, trustworthy science in the High North.