The Arctic is melting faster than almost anybody expected. It has just been reported that the area of sea ice has never been smaller. And having already surpassed previous annual low points in August, it will shrink further in September. Since 1951 the Arctic has warmed roughly twice as much as the global average. So the latest record is a frightening milestone in the advance of climate change. Yet for many in Asia, in the short term, greed trumps fear. The thawing of the north offers the prospect both of access to untold mineral wealth and drastically shorter shipping routes to the Atlantic.
The US Geological Survey has estimated that some 30% of the world’s undiscovered reserves of natural gas, and 13% of the undiscovered oil, lie in the Arctic. It also contains coal, iron, uranium, gold, copper, rare earths, gemstones and much more, including, of course, fish. For the resource-hungry economies of North-East AsiaChina, Japan and South Koreathe chance to exploit these riches seems unmissable.
So too is the hope that the North-East Passage above Russia, also known as the Northern Sea Route (NSR), as well as the North-West Passage from the Atlantic over the top of North America, will become navigable for several months each summer. The NSR cuts the voyage from Shanghai to Hamburg by 6,400km (4,000 miles) compared with the southern journey through the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. It will be even shorter when it is possible to break the ice across the North Pole.
By the same token, equatorial ports that have grown along the routein Singapore and Malaysia, and Hambantota in Sri Lankamight worry about their futures. In 2010 only four ships used the NSR; last year 34 passed through it (compared with nearly 18,000 through the Suez Canal). This August the Xue Long (the name means Snow Dragon), the world’s largest non-nuclear-powered icebreaker, became the first Chinese vessel to traverse the northern route.
Of all Asian countries eyeing the Arctic, it is inevitably China that provokes the most interest and, in some quarters, alarm, for many reasons. It is huge, desperate to secure supplies of energy and other minerals and nervous about the strategic vulnerability implied by its Malacca dilemmathat four-fifths of its energy imports pass through that narrow strait near Singapore.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2012