The Circumpolar

China controls almost every critical mineral the green transition needs. Gørild Heggelund, research professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, explains how it built that lead, going back to a Deng Xiaoping line about oil and rare earths, and why the Arctic states now want an alternative. We get into where the deposits are and what mining means for the people who live there, why Greenland's projects have stalled, Norway's pause on deep sea mining, and China's rare earth export controls against the US. And why Russia and China, so often grouped together in the Arctic, cooperate far less on minerals than their friendship suggests. Our last episode of the season.

China has no Arctic territory, calls itself a near-Arctic state, and has  worked its way into almost every legal regime in the region. Dr Iselin Stensdal talks about international law as China's way in. The conversation covers the Law of the Sea and the Northern Sea Route, the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, the Svalbard Treaty, research rights at Ny-Ålesund, and why China keeps playing by the rules. The closing argument: the Arctic may matter far less to Beijing than the headlines suggest.

For four years, Russian climate data has been nearly impossible to reach. Now the United States is cutting its climate support and stepping back from the IPCC and the UN climate convention. Two of the biggest Arctic states are going dark at the same time, right when we most need to know how fast the climate is shifting.Serafima Andreeva talks with Rolf Rødven, Executive Secretary of AMAP (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, a Working Group of the Arctic Council), about what that missing data actually costs. Pull Russian measurements out of the Arctic station network and some climate models fall back by 80 years. They cover the three hardest data gaps to close, why satellites cannot simply fill them, and why indigenous and traditional knowledge belongs next to the science.

For a dead institution, the Arctic Council has been remarkably busy.Serafima Andreeva draws on four years of research to explain how the Arctic Council survived Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and why it may be one of the more quietly resilient bodies in international diplomacy right now. She goes back to the Council's 1990s origins as a route into post-Soviet Russia, walks through the "temporary pause" of 2022 and the chairship handover from Russia to Norway, and ends with a prediction about what threatens it next. The uncomfortable part: Russia may not be the Council's biggest problem, and the United States belongs in that conversation too.

Japan and South Korea became Arctic Council observers on at the same time in 2013, and they usually get filed alongside China as "Asian observers." But Tokyo and Seoul are not the same actor.Alma Karabeg is writing her PhD on Japan and South Korea in the Arctic at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. We get into what actually drives the engagement (it is partly nation-building), why sustainability is the frame she uses to read both strategies, and how each country handles Russia after 2022. Japan still imports Russian gas. Both had to sanction Moscow even though it does not suit their economies, and both, Alma argues, have a room for maneuver on science diplomacy that the West does not.We finish on the Northern Sea route, Korea's bet on Busan, and a blunt recommendation: European Arctic states are not brave enough about building their own infrastructure or coordinating on what moves through their ports.

Recorded from Rome, we cover the question of what Italy really wants in the Arctic and how it can achieve it. Marco Dordoni, todays guest, is a PhD candidate at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, where his doctoral work looks at how NATO's European non-Arctic states approach Arctic security, and a senior researcher at SIOI, the Rome institute that has shaped Italian thinking on international organizations and diplomacy since 1944.Italy has no Arctic coastline and no Arctic territory, but it has held a seat on the Arctic Council since 2013, and in January 2026 it published its first new Arctic policy in a decade. Marco lays out Italy's mix of interests, from the strategic value of a place at the table alongside the US, Russia, and China, to the concrete stakes of Arctic shipping. If the Northern Sea Route opens for longer each year, it could pull traffic away from Suez and the Mediterranean, with real consequences for ports like Genoa, Trieste, and Taranto. We get into critical minerals and the recent Italy-Norway agreement, what Italy can realistically offer on Arctic defence, and why Rome keeps positioning itself as cautious but present.We also cover Greenland, the Meloni-Trump relationship and where it has cooled, the Arctic Circle Rome Forum, and whether Italy actually has a long-term Arctic strategy at all.

Hybrid threats are everywhere and nowhere. Cable cutting in the Baltic, drone incursions in Copenhagen and Oslo, the shadow fleet moving sanctioned oil under foreign flags, self-igniting parcels routed through DHL, GPS jamming that no longer triggers Article 5 conversations the way it once might have. What counts as hybrid, what counts as warfare, and where is the line?Dr. Gabriella Gricius returns to The Circumpolar to map how Russia operates differently across the Barents, the Baltic, and the Black Sea, why the shadow fleet is really about testing political cohesion rather than oil revenue, and why compounding threats keep her up at night. The conversation covers attribution problems, the limits of UNCLOS, what to make of Russia's ambassador to Norway saying Moscow has no interest in hybrid confrontation, and whether the West can hold a coherent red line when it cannot agree on a coherent response.Dr. Gabriella Gricius is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian Military Academy, a Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute, and a Fellow with the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network. Her work focuses on Arctic and northern European security with a focus on Russia.

Arild Moe, research professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, joins Serafima Andreeva to unpack what the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East mean for Russia's Arctic energy sector. They discuss whether Russia is really benefiting from higher oil prices, why the "Arctic dream economy" looks increasingly fragile, the future of Yamal LNG as Europe prepares to phase out Russian gas, and the growing role of the shadow fleet. Drawing on his recent book with Anna Korppoo, "Climate, Hydrocarbons and Sanctions in the Russian Arctic", published with Edward Elgar, Arild explains why long-distance energy supplies are looking more vulnerable, how climate concerns figure into Russian planning (briefly, it turns out), and what rebuilding relations with Russia might eventually require.Book: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/climate-hydrocarbons-sanctions-9781035355501.html

What does space sustainability actually mean, and why does it matter for the Arctic? In this episode of The Circumpolar, Serafima sits down with Tom Gabriel Royer, PhD candidate in space law at the University of Lapland, co-lead of Working Group 5 on COST Action FOGOS, and Visiting Researcher at the Arctic Centre, to talk through what's happening in the space sector right now and where the real tensions lie.Tom walks through the new EU Space Act proposal, the global push to attract space operators, and what scholars call the space sustainability paradox: we need space to monitor climate change on Earth, but to get there we build infrastructure that disrupts ecosystems on the ground. Launch-related pollution, he argues, is the missing piece in regulation. Even reusable rockets pollute. Reusability solves hardware waste, but it does not eliminate the environmental impact of launch operations.The conversation also turns to Tom's own work on immaterial extractivism around Arctic spaceports like Esrange, where the soundscape, the peacefulness and the emptiness of the land are extracted in the name of science, defence and economic growth. From the 1972 Liability Convention to indigenous perspectives on going to the Moon, Tom asks who actually benefits when we say space is the province of all humanity, and what it would take to do this thoughtfully.

Is space governed well enough, and can we still prevent it from becoming a field of conflict or competition? Serafima sits down with Michael Byers, Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, co-director of the Outer Space Institute and author of Who Owns Outer Space.Space is more governed than people think, Michael argues. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was a remarkable document, and its negotiators were prescient. But space is developing very quickly. In just the last ten years we've gone from 2,000 operational satellites to 15,000, with plans for more than a million more. Add superpowers who are suspicious of each other, a heavy military reliance on satellites, and Donald Trump's so-called Golden Dome with over 1,000 space-based missile interceptors, and the security dilemma starts to look familiar.Drawing on his years working on Arctic governance, Michael walks through the parallels between two areas beyond national jurisdiction where countries almost necessarily have to cooperate. They also get into the renewed race to the moon and why it might really be about Donald Trump's ego, Elon Musk's Mars ambitions and the Starlink user agreement that already declares Mars "a free planet beyond the reach of nation states," the bubble economy of space startups, and what it would actually mean for humanity to find ancient life on another world.