What Arctic Council is and how it works

The bear, and the line named after it

Arctic reached English through the Latin arcticus from the Greek arktikos, of the bear, for the constellation that turns above the northern celestial pole. Antarctic is the same word with a negative prefix on the front of it. The line the name now marks is the parallel above which the sun does not set on the day of the summer solstice, and it does not hold still: the tilt of the Earth's axis oscillates, and the circle is running north at about 14.5 metres a year.

Grímsey is where that is visible. The island lies about 40 kilometres off the north coast of Iceland and is the only Icelandic ground the circle crosses, the mainland sitting south of it. A concrete sphere called Orbis et Globus was set there in 2017 at 66° 33.9′ north to mark the position, and it is dragged further up the island each year to keep pace. The calculation published with the work puts the circle off Grímsey altogether around 2047.

Denmark's own territory stops near 57° 45′ north at the tip of Jutland. Its seat is held for the whole kingdom, and Greenland and the Faroe Islands are named in the delegation that fills it.

A declaration, and what it does not create

The Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council was signed at Ottawa on 19 September 1996. It runs to a page: a high level forum for cooperation among the Arctic States on common concerns, with no ratification behind it and no legal personality in front of it. The forum it built stands on the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy the same states had adopted at Rovaniemi in June 1991, which had already put them around one table on contaminants.

Article 7 makes decisions of the Council decisions by consensus of the members. Article 4 has the Council meeting normally every second year, with senior officials meeting more often than that. Two footnotes qualify the text and both are load bearing. The first keeps matters related to military security out of the Council's business. The second records that the word peoples, used throughout the declaration, carries no implication about rights under international law.

The seats that belong to no state

Article 2 seated three organisations of Arctic indigenous peoples as Permanent Participants at the founding: the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, since renamed the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Saami Council, and the Association of Indigenous Minorities of the Far North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation. The same article provided for others, and six hold the standing now, the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council and the Gwich'in Council International having been added since. They are consulted in full before the Council decides anything and they do not decide it, because Article 7 counts consensus among the members alone.

Observers form a third category, opened by Article 3 to non-Arctic states, intergovernmental bodies and non-governmental organisations. Thirteen states hold it. An observer reaches the work through a member or a Permanent Participant, speaks after both have spoken, and may not finance a project beyond what the Arctic States finance unless the senior officials agree otherwise.

Five coasts, and the questions the Council does not touch

Finland and Sweden hold Arctic land with no Arctic Ocean shore on it. The other five met at Ilulissat on 28 May 2008 without them: Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark by way of Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States. Their declaration recalled that the law of the sea already governs the delineation of the outer limits of the continental shelf, the protection of the marine environment and freedom of navigation, and stated that they saw no need for a new comprehensive international legal regime for the Arctic Ocean.

Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark and Russia have each filed a submission with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf claiming shelf that reaches the North Pole, and the three overlap along the Lomonosov Ridge. The United States is not a party to the convention that set up the commission and has filed nothing with it. None of that passes through the Arctic Council, which has no standing over a boundary and takes no position on one.

What the forum has produced

Three legally binding agreements were negotiated under the Council's auspices and signed by all the member states at ministerial meetings: aeronautical and maritime search and rescue at Nuuk in May 2011, marine oil pollution preparedness and response at Kiruna in May 2013, and enhancing international Arctic scientific cooperation at Fairbanks in May 2017. Each stands as an agreement between the states themselves. The Council is party to none of them.

Six working groups carry the continuous work, on contaminants, on monitoring and assessment, on flora and fauna, on emergency prevention and response, on the marine environment and on sustainable development. A standing secretariat opened at Tromsø in 2013.

The chair, and the pause

The chair passes between the members every second year. Russia took it in 2021, and on 3 March 2022 the other seven states issued a joint statement pausing their participation in all meetings of the Council and its subsidiary bodies pending consideration of how the work might continue. Working group activity resumed by written procedure in August 2023, and virtual working group meetings from February 2024. The fourteenth ministerial meeting, held online on 12 May 2025 with participants gathered at Romssa-Tromsø, closed Norway's chairship and opened the Kingdom of Denmark's, which runs to 2027.