Human Security in the Arctic
Gunhild Hoogensen, Department of Political Science, University of Tromsø, Norway, gunhildh@sv.uit.no, http://www.sv.uit.no/ansatte/edvarda/gunhildh/

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Arctic region ought to be a region of human security focus. The Arctic features in the Lysøen declaration on human security between Canada and Norway, and was recently highlighted as an important but thus far neglected area for human security research at the Canada Norway Peace Prize Symposium 2005. The Arctic offers a great deal to our understanding of human security, particularly in the context of environmental impact and change. As a region generally considered “pristine” it has few local sources of pollution. However the region is affected by transfers of industrial substances from the south, which in turn affect the human and animal populations living within the region. The relationship between the environment and human populations in the Arctic is not yet well explored, but reports are beginning to take note of the impacts of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), other pollutants, and climate change on northern communities. In the human security context these environmental impacts demonstrate themselves through diverse securities and insecurities, including food, health, societal (identity), and economic securities. This paper will present a number of the human security and environmental relationships to be found in the Arctic region. Using a human security approach informed by relations of dominance and non-dominance (rooted in gender and indigenous theoretical perspectives), the paper will also demonstrate the importance of the Arctic region to the development of the human security concept with relation to environmental change.