Within our lifetime, the Arctic Ocean will transform from a permanent sea-ice cap to a seasonally ice-free sea. Like a fertile area becoming a desert or a glacier becoming a mountain valley, this is an environmental state-change where the boundary conditions and dynamics of the system are fundamentally replaced. Consider that the boundaries of the Arctic Ocean have been the sea-ice cap, the sea floor and surrounding continents, with inflow-outflow from the North Pacific and North Atlantic, together with solar forcing from the Sun. Removing the sea-ice cap fundamentally alters the dynamics of this Arctic Ocean system. Over timescales that are relevant to humans in the region, even in a historical context over centuries and millennia, the new Arctic Ocean is unprecedented.

Consequences of the environmental state-change in the Arctic Ocean are explored in this Whitehall paper, with focus on the overlying geopolitical risks that will influence sustainable development across the maritime region at the top of the Earth. These risks are characterised in terms of political, economic and cultural instabilities requiring governments to allocate resources in an unplanned manner, or at the expense of previously prioritised activities. The objective of this paper is to introduce environmental security as a holistic framework to address the inherent risks of political, economic and cultural instabilities that are emerging as the Arctic Ocean is transformed into a new natural system.