Dr Khalid Khan
For much of modern history, the Arctic was imagined as a distant white barrier: difficult to reach, hostile to commerce and largely beyond ordinary political life. During the Cold War, it had a different significance. It was a theatre of nuclear deterrence, long-range surveillance, submarine operations and air routes. Yet its physical severity limited what states could do there.
That condition is changing. The Arctic is warming rapidly, sea ice is thinning and seasonal access is expanding. NOAA reported that the March 2025 Arctic sea-ice maximum was the lowest in the 47-year satellite record. At the end of summer, ice cover was 28 per cent less extensive than in 2005, and the ice that remained was younger and thinner.
This does not mean the Arctic has become easy, safe or open for business. It remains one of the world’s most dangerous operating environments. But changing ice conditions are increasing pressure for shipping, surveillance, extraction, telecommunications, ports, search and rescue, and military presence. The geography is changing faster than the rules and relationships required to manage it. That is why the Arctic deserves attention not only as a climate story, but as a climate-security question. The risk is not that war is inevitable. It is that climate disruption, strategic competition, infrastructure investment and weak governance can reinforce one another until mistrust becomes harder to reverse.
After the Soviet collapse, the Arctic was widely seen as an area where cooperation could coexist with wider geopolitical differences. The 1996 Ottawa Declaration created the Arctic Council, bringing together Arctic states, Indigenous Permanent Participants and scientific cooperation. It has done important work on environmental protection, sustainable development and practical cooperation. But military security was deliberately left outside its mandate. That division made sense in a less tense era. It is now a limitation. Since 2014, relations between Russia and Western states have deteriorated. Since 2022, the war in Ukraine, Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and stronger High North security postures have brought climate, infrastructure and military questions closer together. The Arctic Council has not disappeared, but the political conditions that sustained easy cooperation have weakened. The result is a more crowded and more ambiguous region. A new port may serve communities and commercial activity, but it may also have strategic value. Better satellite links can improve safety and science, but they also improve surveillance. Search-and-rescue capacity is essential in a hazardous environment, yet it can be viewed through a security lens when trust is low. These are not arguments against investment. They are arguments for transparency, environmental safeguards and arrangements that prevent legitimate activity from becoming a source of suspicion.
Several futures are possible. The most constructive is managed competition: states retain real security interests, but their conduct is bounded by incident-prevention arrangements, scientific cooperation, environmental rules and meaningful community consent. A more worrying path is securitised extraction, in which military visibility, dual-use infrastructure and opaque investment expand while cooperation narrows. The gravest, though less likely, scenario is an incident involving air, naval, infrastructure or access rights that escalates amid wider Russia-NATO tension.
The question is what moves the region from one path to another. Transparent operations, practical dialogue, shared maritime safety and credible safeguards support managed competition. Opaque infrastructure deals, weak environmental review, hostile rhetoric and poor channels for deconfliction push the system in the other direction.
For Pakistan and other climate-vulnerable countries, this is not distant geopolitics. It is part of the same climate-justice question. Countries already exposed to floods, heat, food and water stress, coastal risks and development losses have a direct interest in preventing climate disruption from weakening the cooperation needed to respond to it.
Arctic states should strengthen incident-prevention protocols through existing maritime, aviation and search-and-rescue channels, including notification, emergency communications and protection of scientific and rescue operations. Major infrastructure and mineral projects should demonstrate not only commercial viability, but community consent, ecological safeguards, emergency readiness and public benefit. Regulators and lenders should assess emissions, black carbon, biodiversity loss, spill risk and response capability alongside financial return.
A standing United Nations dialogue could connect Arctic governance with climate justice and conflict prevention, giving climate-vulnerable states a legitimate voice in a transformation that affects the whole planet. Such an approach does not deny the security concerns of Arctic states. It places those concerns within a wider duty: to protect nature, people and peace while the physical foundations of global stability are changing.
The Arctic is not a prize created by melting ice. It is a warning. The task is not to turn every investment into a geopolitical accusation, nor to pretend that competition does not exist. It is to build rules, transparency, environmental safeguards and crisis-prevention arrangements before competition hardens into confrontation. Diplomacy, science and safeguards must move faster than the melting ice.
—The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Rawalpindi.
