Social Indicators for Arctic Resource Development: Observing Trends and Assessing Data

This paper reviews and assesses the state of data to describe and monitor trends in mining and hydrocarbon development in the pan-Arctic, and their social effects. The widely available measures of mineral production and value are poor proxies for economic effects on arctic communities. Furthermore, historical data is not available for much of the region.

The most critically needed improvement in data collection and reporting is to develop comparable measures of employment. The eight arctic countries each use different definitions of employment and different methodologies to collect the data. Furthermore, many countries do not report employment by county and industry, so the arctic share of mining employment cannot be identified. More work needs to be done developing conceptual models of effects of mining activities on fate control, cultural continuity, and ties to nature for local arctic communities. More work also needs to be done to develop indicator measures for ecosystem service flows.

The trends in mining activity that we found include stasis or decline in mature regions of the Arctic, and strong growth in the frontier regions. The biggest driver in the arctic frontier is the availability of large, undiscovered, and untapped resources with favorable access and low political risk. Climate change has diverse and regionally-specific effects, and does not contribute to trends overall.