Polar Points of View: Risk Briefings

Climate Risk Briefings offer clear, concise insights to help tackle global climate threats, with a focus on science, data, and Arctic impacts.

COP29 Policy Considerations

Governments, both within and outside the Polar and greater Cryosphere regions, need to incorporate the impacts of polar and glacial change into all policies and strategies relating to the global climate crisis, including global and local risks.

Governments, both within and outside the Arctic region, need to incorporate Arctic change into all policies and strategies relating to the global climate crisis, including global and local risks.

The Polar regions, particularly the Arctic, will determine the fate of humanity. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay there but ramps up societal and economic risks globally through inter alia extreme weather, supply chain disruptions, conflicts over resources, food and water insecurities, economic stresses, wildfires, and disease.

COP29 Policy Considerations Risk Briefing

Risk Webinar with Deloitte

In July 2023 we hosted a webinar on Data and Climate Risk Management, co-hosted by Deloitte Africa and Arctic Basecamp

Watch it back and learn how data can help us understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and Arctic disruption on the world’s economy and society. Develop a greater understanding and how to better assess widely unconsidered risks to enable more informed decision making and forward planning.

Head to the webinar

Risk Webinar with Delotte — Caption Text

Arctic Circle Assembly Ambassadorial Briefing

Watch Professor Gail Whiteman speak on the polar crisis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 17, 2023.

The poles are warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, destabilizing permafrost, ancient glaciers and sea ice. As such, the Arctic and the Antarctic are the Earth’s “canary in the coalmine”.

ACA 2023—Ambassadorial Briefing

Risk Briefing Summary 2022

The dramatic changes in the Arctic provide an early warning of the climate emergency.
The latest analysis paints a picture of rapidly unfolding environmental breakdown as a direct result of increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. In turn, this breakdown fuels further global warming.

The arctic breakdown has direct implications for instability across the rest of the world.
Sea levels rise as glaciers and ice sheets melt. Arctic warming favors increased extreme weather elsewhere - heatwaves, droughts, storms, and even cold spells.

The arctic is in crisis as its ice disappears.
Sea ice continues to shrink in area and thickness, the Greenland ice sheet continues to melt and accelerate sea-level rise, and the permafrost continues to thaw, threatening communities, ecosystems and carbon feedbacks.

Arctic breakdown elevates risk far beyond its borders.
This adds urgency to implementing near-term mitigation to prevent global temperature rises beyond 1.5°C and reduce the magnitude of rapid Arctic change. The COP26 UNFCCC meeting represents a critical moment for high-level recognition of these risks as well as the plans to mitigate them.