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Defending The Arctic
Morgan Levey | May 10, 2018
Northwestern partners with the World Wildlife Fund to protect vulnerable Arctic species
Story by Morgan Levey, a graduate student at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
Noise can be maddening, particularly when it’s beyond our control. The chirp of a smoke detector with a dead battery, the rumbling of the “L” train in Chicago, the sound of a jackhammer from road construction. Noise can be so disruptive to our daily lives that we call it pollution and create regulations to govern it.
Noisy neighbor? We call the cops. But in the Arctic, the populations whose lives are most disrupted by noise can’t complain. “For whales, sound is really important. It's a crucial way of enabling them to navigate through their world,” says Melanie Lancaster, the Arctic species specialist with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), one of the world’s leading conservation organizations.
Whales, specifically species endemic to the Arctic like belugas and narwhals, use sound to echolocate, allowing them to find prey, communicate with family, or locate other pod members. And for bowhead whales, noise is essential to courtship and mating — they sing to each other. “Bowhead whales are a bit like the Barry White of the whale world,” Lancaster laughs.
Noise pollution from ships, seismic surveys and infrastructure development in the Arctic have the potential to interfere with whales’ way of life. It can disorient them, force them to leave necessary breeding grounds, drown out their calls or cause some to go silent. And it’s only becoming more destructive.
Nowhere on earth is climate change more apparent than the poles. Warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, the Arctic is becoming the next frontier for industry, a freshly thawed and largely untapped landscape. Ice is melting earlier each spring and forming later each fall, creating shorter, more direct shipping lanes through the Northwest Passage and exposing new territory for oil and gas extraction and mining. Each of these industries brings a new source of noise and a new way of disrupting life for Arctic animals.
“We shouldn't treat noise any differently for wildlife than we do for people,” Lancaster says. She coordinates Arctic species conservation work for WWF’s Arctic Programme, a regional program with a goal to ensure a well-managed, biodiverse and resilient Arctic where sustainability is prioritized over exploitation. The species component of the program focuses on conserving animals that are important to Arctic ecosystems and the people who rely on them, including polar bears, walruses, caribou and three whale species — belugas, narwhals and bowheads.
Beginning in the summer of 2017, WWF began working with the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Environmental Advocacy Center (EAC) to assess the existing legislation that protects Arctic species from the impacts of underwater noise caused by industry. The relationship developed due to cooperation between Northwestern University and WWF facilitated in large part by the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN).
Using extensive research, EAC’s goal was to identify the legal frameworks and guidelines in place by governing bodies and industries respectively and then to suggest advocacy strategies to WWF — areas where the organization might be able to influence change.
“Before we talk about what the legislation and policy should be we really needed to find out what are some of the best practices that are out there,” Lancaster says. “And we can be using them to talk about what should be done.”
Under the guidance of EAC Director Nancy Loeb, students Natale Fuller (Law ‘17) and Gerry Hirschfeld (Law ‘17) conducted research over the course of the summer and fall quarters, respectively. “One of the most exciting parts is to see that this research is actually going to be used to advocate for change,” Fuller says.
Her research revolved around collecting and researching legislation and legal frameworks in place across six countries that border the Arctic (Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the U.S.) and the European Union that regulate underwater noise. Hirschfeld’s work, the following quarter, examined industry-wide environmental standards for shipping, oil and gas, mining and infrastructure development. These four industries are expected to significantly increase their activities in the Arctic as a result of a longer ice-free period.
In the end the students found little regulation that dealt specifically with protecting mammals from underwater noise and that was also broad enough to establish an international standard across countries and industries. “I think I was just surprised at how specific the laws can get,” Fuller says. “Even if you have a really good regulation, it can just be for one industry, one kind of sound, one area.”
Canada, for instance, created a mandatory guideline in 2016 to mitigate seismic sound in the marine environment. For Fuller, this was one of the best examples she found as the law standardizes mitigation measures with respect to seismic surveys across all industries. But for WWF, the ultimate goal is a pan-Arctic approach that takes into account the best science and the needs of species that are on the move. “These species don't necessarily respect national borders. They roam over them and they run across them,” Lancaster says. “Doing something just at the national level may not be adequate for their conservation.”
In addition, seismic surveys emit one type of sound through exploration conducted by oil and gas and mining industries. International laws will also need to address drilling and shipping noise — ice breaking, the rumble of boat engines and propeller cavitation, the movement of a propeller underwater. These noises are more chronic and of a lower intensity than the noise created by seismic surveys, which are acute and tend to be one off.
For conservationists, the end goal is to identify best practices and use them to create global international standards recognized and adhered to by all countries and industries, according to Loeb, that govern operations in the open waters of the Arctic. While this exists in the Antarctic, there’s a big difference in the two poles. “The Antarctic is a landmass. The Arctic is open waters that are just now opening up more and more,” Loeb says. And open waters are borderless, making them more difficult to govern.
But WWF is making headway at an international level. At the Arctic Council, the intergovernmental forum on Arctic conservation and sustainable development, a full review of the impacts of underwater noise from shipping on Arctic species is currently being led by the Canadian Government and WWF. “This is a great starting point for actually developing Arctic-specific guidelines,” Lancaster says. The work done by the EAC students helped WWF make a case for this work.
It’s clear that by specifically targeting guidelines and best practices around noise, WWF is addressing issues that actually go beyond noise pollution. It’s a way into other environmental aspects that need protection. “If shipping paths are determined in ways that are designed to protect species from noise, they are also likely to be more protective of habitats and breeding paths,” Loeb says.
For both EAC and WWF, assessing underwater noise legislations for the Arctic was a successful initial project. “The Arctic is the first project of what we hope will be many,” Loeb says. WWF is interested in continuing to utilize EAC’s legal skills and for EAC, working with WWF gives students experience with international environmental issues.