The Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series

Ambassador Mary Simon February 7, 2003

On Friday, February 7, 2003, the Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series hosted Ambassador Mary Simon. Ambassador Simon delivered a thought-provoking presentation entitled "The North: A Unique Environmental Responsibility - Emerging Governance in the Circumpolar Region", followed by a highly interactive question and answer period. The following is a précis of the seminar delivered by Ms. Simon.

It has now been six years since Canada and our circumpolar neighbours came together and established the Arctic Council; a unique forum comprised of the eight Arctic States and Indigenous Peoples’ organizations as Permanent Participants.

Ensuring that human security, environmental integrity and good governance are mutually reinforcing objectives is the common challenge of Council members. In the Arctic, transboundary pollutants, loss of biodiversity and climate change remain areas of deep concern.

The Arctic has become unofficially known as an environmental indicator of the health of the planet. Although, relative to most other areas of the word, the Arctic remains a clean environment, the presence of some pollutants gives rise to concern in certain ecosystems and some human populations.

The restriction or banning of many persistent organic pollutants (POPs) since the 1970’s provides an excellent example of how sound scientific evidence has allowed our governments and indigenous peoples to join forces to influence the direction of international agreements.

At the same time, much work remains to be done. Despite the progress, POPs such as DDT, PCBs and dioxins persist in the northern environment in concentrations high enough to affect the health of the local fauna. PCB and mercury exposure in Arctic communities have also been linked to immunological and neuro-developmental effects. Meanwhile, new POPs in increasing levels are just being discovered.

In certain ways, it is the Sustainable Development Working Group that poses the most significant challenges in finding new ways for States to work together and for northerners to work with States and with each other. Sustainable development carries many different meanings. A salient features is that equitable outcomes are needed.

The Arctic Vulnerability Study currently underway will attempt to better understand the past impact of three local level drivers: climate change, pollution and globalization. The intent is to calibrate the global climate change models to local communities in the Arctic and then to project climate change impacts forward through a full generation (25 years). The output will be to test the usefulness of the new methodology in understanding the vulnerability of specific communities.

A recent success is Canada’s collaboration with the Arctic Council to bring an "Arctic Voice" to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. We are reminded that the Arctic did not receive any attention in the documents that emerged from the Rio Summit. Ten years later, it is now understood that the Arctic is clearly a region of focus when matters related to the environment and development are discussed.

In the question period following the formal presentation, audience members posed a number of questions that drew more upon Ambassador Simon’s personal thoughts and experience as the only Ambassador in this forum that is a northern indigenous native.

Questions prompted Ms. Simon to described one of the main challenges northerners continue to face: the lack of scientific credibility in the accumulated knowledge about northern ecosystems that has been acquired through generations of experience and passed on in an oral tradition. There is a dire need to take into account the validity of traditional indigenous knowledge in assessments and decision making processes and to consider this knowledge on par with western scientific knowledge.

Another challenge is to demonstrate how problems in the north, in turn, affect other parts of the world. To illustrate, it is considered desirable to have populations continue to inhabit the north, however, we must provided incentives such as education and jobs in these communities to retain or draw back educated native northerners.