Kobe University Polar Cooperation Research Centre (PCRC) held its third international symposium “The Role of Non-Arctic States / Actors in the Arctic Legal Order-Making” on 7-9 December 2017. PCRC was established in order to promote research on Arctic international legal and policy issues in October 2015. PCRC held its kick-off symposium overviewing the present status of the Arctic legal order-making in December 2015 and the second symposium focusing on legal order-making in the Arctic Ocean in July 2016. The outcome of these two symposia will be published soon in a book from Toshindo in Japanese. Based on these research activities, the third symposium intended to highlight the role of non-Arctic States such as Japan and China in the Arctic legal order-making. The academia and practitioners invited by PCRC from Japan and abroad made presentations and participated actively in the discussion. A total of 77 participants attended the symposium.
From January 21st to 26th, Arctic Frontiers 2018 was held in Tromsø, Norway. This is an international conference held annually in Tromsø, which assembles policy-makers, business stakeholders and researchers mainly from Northern European countries and provides a venue for discussions on sustainable development in the Arctic. Most of the sessions were closely associated with this year’s key theme on “Connecting the Arctic”. In line with this, topics focusing on the latest technologies in telecommunications and the commercial use of the Northern Sea Route were frequently mentioned during the conference.
A workshop entitled “The 6th EA Workshop on Ecosystem Approach Guidelines and Integrated Ecosystem Assessment” has been held at Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle on January 9 – 11, 2018.
The second meeting of PAME 2017 had been carried out on Sep.18-20 in Helsinki. In the meeting, wide range of issues regarding environmental effect and action related to ship activities in the Arctic Ocean were discussed.
ArCS project’s 2017 plenary meeting was held at Miyoshi Memorial Auditorium and foyer, JAMSTEC Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences on Tuesday, 30th and Wednesday, 31st May, 2017. The event was attended by around 90 participants.
From 20 March 2017 to 1 February 2018 I am staying at the Aalborg University Centre for Innovation and Research in Culture and Living in the Arctic (AAU-CIRCLA) in the Kingdom of Denmark, thanks to the support given to me under the ArCS’ program for overseas visits by young researchers (See photos 1, 2 and 3).
Mooring observations in the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow) locating in the northernmost Alaska were conducted in the period from early to mid-August 2017. Such observations have been carried out since 2009 under a cooperation between Hokkaido University and University of Alaska Fairbanks with the support from local science institutions.
The third ArCS council meeting was held on Monday, 4th December 2017 at JAMSTEC Tokyo Office in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.
From November 20 to 22, the meeting entitled ‘Recent Mass Loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet – Mechanism and Evaluation’ was held at the Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
