 So, again, the method behind the madness of this day-long conversation has been to think about ways to strengthen Arctic cooperation and in some ways help shape, think through, influence what will happen in 10 months when the U.S. assumes the chairmanship of the Arctic Council. And so we've assembled four fantastic panelists to help be very provocative. Now, Julie, we exclude you from the provocative. If you make news, we may put you in trouble a little bit, but you can make as much news as you would like. To talk about some things that the chairmanship should do, where we should be ambitious, where the international political dynamic may lead us not to be ambitious, but to preserve, protect, and strengthen the work of the Arctic Council. So our moderator now turned panelist, Dr. Marlene Morel. Again, Marlene is a research professor at GW, but she has done, and I'll say this, I think she's written one of the very best books that came out, end of last year, early this year on the Russian Arctic and thinking through the dynamics of what's going on in the Russian Arctic. Best, Marlene, to give us her perspective, understanding the international dynamics and climate that the Arctic Council is going to be doing its work. And then after Marlene has finished with her remarks, we're going to move to Dr. Tom Axworthy, who's the CEO of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, a position he's held since 2009. The Gordon Foundation is very focused on the Arctic and has a fantastic program as well as on water issues. Prior to this assignment, Dr. Axworthy served as the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at Queens University, but was a longstanding McKenzie King Chair of Canadian Studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. And he has also has served as a political strategist and policy advisor to former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. And he has some very interesting thoughts on the Canadian chairmanship as well as the future of Arctic cooperation. And then after Tom will move to Julie Gourly, the American senior Arctic official, the lady that knows more about the Arctic Council, working groups, task force. She lives through them all in a complete stalwart in this department. Prior to this position in the State Department, she also served in the State Department's Office of Environmental Policy and had done some previous work with the Environmental Protection Agency. And then bringing us home, as we like to say, use our baseball analogies, playing clean up Dr. Lawson Brigham. We'll be back and giving us some thoughts on what the US chairmanship should do and many of the areas that he works on with the Arctic Council. So as I said, we're going to hit them hard and end strong on the binge day here. And with that, Marlene, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much. I don't know if I would be provocative. I don't think so. There are three elements I would like to mention here. The first one is that Arctic is populated, and therefore, populations should be really a central focus. Of course, indigenous people are key. And as you may remember, last year, the Russian Association, representing indigenous people, Raipan, has been facing huge difficulties coming from Moscow. So that was an alarming situation. I think now things are going better, but just a kind of reminder that nothing is never given and that things can be changing. The other things related to population is that indigenous people are not the only actors in the Arctic. There is a growing trend toward urbanization everywhere in the Arctic related to economic development. We see it everywhere and it's usually something that I think tend to be underestimated and underlooked what it will be. Absolutely strategic in terms of economic development. Of course, on that also, Russia is the key actor because of the kind of Soviet legacy of having big cities you still have now in Russia, five to six, seven, depending how you calculate. Big cities with between 200,000 to 300,000. So they are facing specific issues that are really related to urban infrastructure that should also be taken into account. If you put this trend toward urbanization in parallel with what we know about permafrost towing, then you have a very complex picture that certainly emerged. So the media focus on ice melting is one thing, but the permafrost towing is another really important issue. If you look at the 2012 UN environmental program report on the permafrost towing, it's really an alarmist one in terms of the impact of this permafrost towing onto the global warming, but it's also threatened and that's really important, all urban structure. And the information we have from Russia, for example, are that between 40% and 80% of housing and energy infrastructure damage in Russia's Arctic are due to the permafrost towing and that's only the beginning of the process. So that's really something that would be impacting directly the sustainability, sustainability theory of human life and economic trend in the Arctic and I think that should be one of the focus of the Arctic Council. Another issue that we'd mentioned a little bit this morning is that how to avoid kind of spillover situation in the Arctic and be sure that regional cooperation and patterns are pursue. And I think people-to-people relationship are really something important. So I would infer that the success of this Arctic University Consortium that has really been a great experiment that should be develop the role of indigenous scientists and creating indigenous elites is also something important. But in terms of people-to-people interaction, there is kind of interesting parallel. If you look at all the project we have for the European part of the Arctic between Russia and Nordic countries or Russia, US and Nordic countries and you compare with what we have on the Pacific side of the Arctic, then there is a kind of, I mean, this Pacific facade seems to be forgotten in terms of people-to-people exchange. So we need more exchanges between Far East and Alaska, but we also need to bring the Asian countries probably somewhere in the picture. And here also, if you look at the narrative that we have about China, South Korea and Japan entering this Arctic debate, it's still very much kind of geopolitical oriented narrative. And I think these three Asian countries really aspire to be knowledge power. And they are driving, their interest in the Arctic is really driven, of course, by economic issues, but also by knowledge issue. And so any kind of project that would be trilateral, Russia, US, China, Russia, US, Japan, Russia, US, South Korea, on the model of the exchanges and cooperation we have on the Atlantic side would probably be something also to be developed and to avoid the kind of geopolitical narrative we have about why suddenly China is interested in the Arctic. And the last point I wanted to mention is, of course, scientific cooperation. I mean, science diplomacy is always a good solution when you have geopolitical tensions as we may have now around Ukraine. And it was working very well in Soviet time, so it should be pursued. One of the, I think, interesting element kind of looking forward, future of scientific cooperation is the nexus between the private sector and scientific cooperation. And here also, one example coming from the Russian side, everything related to communication in the Arctic has really become something very important for Russia. And Russia had to wait 2011 to be able to have a full satellite coverage of its own Arctic region, so because it's, of course, very challenging. You now have a full coverage, at least theoretically, Russia has been developing a lot of, launching a lot of low orbit satellite to be able to offer this coverage. And you have growing cooperation between the space agency and the meteorological agency in Russia, for example, working on a so-called multi-purpose space system, Arctic, that would be monitoring emergency situation, environmental situation, and also working on everything related to mobile communication and broadcasting in the Arctic. I think that something that in the future will be really important because that's where the private sector is involved, that's something where you have international cooperation, that's something where scientists can really be involved and that's a nice way of pursuing communication that is useful in terms of security, diving, shipping lanes in terms of environment and in terms also of improving the well-being of the Arctic population. So three elements, urbanization and permafrost to be looked at, people-to-people exchange with a look on the Pacific side and this kind of nexus between private sector and science as being my kind of three focus or ideas to look at for the future of chairmanship. I like it. All right. Dr. Xferdi. Good. Well, good afternoon and congratulations all of you who are still with us late in the afternoon. I did, I had to respond though to the cartoon that John Farrell brought up. Mr. Nixon and Mr. Trudeau who had an interesting relationship and I recall at the time of the transcripts of Mr. Nixon were published where several world leaders were discussed some in uncomplimentary terms including my then boss Mr. Trudeau, the epitaph SOB was in front of every time. The president mentioned Mr. Trudeau and then of course our media loved that story and in the very first press conference after the Nixon transcripts came out the prime minister was asked what did he think about this and how he would respond and he said, well, I've been called worst things by better people. So your cartoon brought home an old anecdote. I think the message that I want to bring to you and it's the same one which I have argued in my home capital of Ottawa is that what is crucial in the years ahead is that the Arctic Council not catch the Crimea flu that there are obvious disagreements geopolitically with many states on a host of issues, but the concept of linkage where disagreements in one area then get reflected by no cooperation or a wall or a barrier on every issue is a recipe for stasis. And it never made much sense and our whole history during the Cold War years was to disagree and to have policies around containment and so on where they were necessary with a high security component, covert operations and all the rest. Well, at the same time having to taunt to look at where there were areas where we could cooperate, where it was in everyone's interest to do so and also having the beneficial aspect of when one is talking and cooperating on a host of other issues, it is hard to think of your colleague who is cooperative in one area as your enemy in another. And therefore the taunt of cooperation begins to break down what we talked about this morning at our very first panel which is reactions, misapprehensions, misperceptions, anxieties and so on. So it's that framework which I want to argue today and provide some examples of it because as well as it being in everyone's interest, Russia's and everyone else's to have a cooperative agenda if it were possible on the host of issues that we've talked about today. I also want to remind the audience, it was mentioned by you Heather and I think some others that the very idea of the Arctic as a means or as a place for cooperation began with Mr. Gorbachev. And so Russia has a and the Soviet Union has a pride a place in saying this is an area where this process where the taunt should really make itself known in concrete actions. Along the history of the council then and Ken and Raymond spent some time on the history of the council. There's a second episode though that after Gorbachev era was over at the time when there was debates of whether there should be an Arctic council at all with the United States being reluctant at that juncture of history. We're delighted that the United States is such an enthusiastic participant in the Arctic council now which we hope will be a very active and exciting chairmanship. But in the early nineties that was not the case. And at that point almost forgotten actually forgotten is that President Yeltsin came and made a very strong statement in favor of the concept of an Arctic council. And that was very important at that point to have one of the superpowers continue to say this was a good idea. The Norwegians and others were beginning to waver a little bit in the nineties. And the Yeltsin statement which you made with Mr. Mulroney was a very important one in saying that one of the major players was still very interested in this concept. So as well as all the concrete areas we're talking about today and in the future historically Russia really has in part pride of place in the very idea of the Arctic council. So that should not be forgotten when we look at in the future the areas where we do wanna draw lines and in the areas where we do want to cooperate. So that is my main framework that I want to argue today. Within that framework then an area which may or may not had there be exactly in the topic of the panel which is advice to the United States on its chairmanship of the council because this is an issue that I raised this morning about whether I'm unsure of whether the Arctic council is the right venue for what I'm just gonna recommend. But I am gonna make the point that I did this morning that the area one of the great, great achievements of the past generation is that our focus on the Arctic as a military frontier in the Cold War one of the great things that has happened is that that has almost entirely dissipated. And when our chiefs of staff get together it's discussed search and rescue rather than deterrent policy over the Arctic. That's in a world which doesn't have much good news that's a great good news piece. Therefore there are worries that we may be backtracking from that achievement when we begin to look again at the Arctic through a military lens. And therefore we shouldn't just let it go when perceptions have gone to emerge again that military capabilities might matter that we might in fact begin to fall into the adversarial mindset which we had for many, many years. So therefore it's not unimportant to ensure that that doesn't happen. And one way to do that I think is to begin to think through do we need at this juncture and a good agenda of confidence building measures, Arctic arms control measures, ideas for further cooperations between our militaries to ensure that that useful development is not overtaken by the perceptions and the maladies that result from the crymia flu. So therefore the question then arises that and that's to prevent us going into old habits. And as well as to do some new thinking in the 21st century what might those concrete measures be? Now the issue that I raised this morning is that we have no logical place to discuss that at the present time. The NATO rush of council for many reasons is not appropriate. Military security is not part of the Arctic council. We've had some informal meetings with that as a little bit of a theme but not as a central theme. So one thing that I would like to argue for the American chairmanship, it may not be within the Arctic council per se, but just as we've had the discussion about fisheries which was a parallel development with many of the same participants in the Arctic council though not an Arctic council event per se, it might be very useful to bring together Arctic states to think about to address the security issue at least around confidence building measures and or cooperation in that regard. I think that would be some place to have our negotiators, diplomats, military folks and others actually substantively discussing this would be very useful because I'm nervous that there's no place it gets discussed in a meaningful kind of way. So one suggestion for all of us is to think about an appropriate form for that to begin. It could for example be Canada and Finland which called the first meetings to discuss the Arctic council. Canada and Finland, a member of NATO in a neutral state could call interested states to talk about confidence building measures in the Arctic getting beforehand the prior agreement that Russia and the United States would attend in order to begin to flesh out that agenda or it could be something if the United States thought this was an appropriate area to push the cooperation button that they could convene themselves as one of the superpowers. But my argument is that surprisingly but I think in a realistic way we need to go back to that security issue to make sure that bad habits don't road what is really one of the great accomplishments that we've done in the Arctic in the last while. Then very briefly and quickly then on the Arctic council itself. Looking at the machinery of the Arctic council is to me again useful steps that have occurred in terms of the secretariat. I'm sure we'll hear from Julie about many of the useful things that have been done to heighten the effectiveness of the Arctic council as an institution but that work is far from complete. We just really got the secretariat in the last little while. The financing of the Arctic council and the financing of the working groups the scientists and the others who are so crucial that is still depends on a whip round that you have among states and others who are interested in that particular topic. So how one addresses the financing of the work of the Arctic council is to me an important next step for effective international organizations should have some means of financing that they can rely upon. Now where would if in most international organizations there's a fee or there's a stipend or there's a call upon some guaranteed resources. Those steps I think should be usefully looked at and then I would look at two additional areas to make the case of where that money could be well used if we could raise more. The first is it has been mentioned here as well. How important the permanent participants in the Aboriginal and indigenous perspective is on a host of issues, not least climate change and how important the land and the water is to the spirituality of that important group of peoples across the circumpolar Arctic. Well, it's one thing to have legal status, it's another to have the real capacity to use it well. And it's not enough to have a legal right to attend a working group if you don't really know what they're talking about and you haven't had the chance to be well prepared. So having a well prepared, having the resources for the permanent participants to use to help them do a better job to use their status appropriately for their peoples and for the broader value system. To me, that's the next logical step in ensuring that really gets looked at. The Canadians have begun to push a little bit in that direction. It strikes me as an excellent thing for the United States to pick up on the Obama administration in particular that that is something which should not be a hard sell and it would have tremendous benefits across the gamut of issues in the Arctic Council if the permanent participants were well funded. Not least, that would include Rayupon in Russia that they might have some calls upon independent funds and that would at least in a little bit help their independent status which was so threatened a year ago. So making sure that permanent participants can in fact be utilized to their full ability which we need on every issue that's been raised here today. And that's a piece of financing and mechanics that fit right into, I think, a possible American agenda. And lastly, where else could the money be used? I think it was, yes, I think it was Lawson raised it but I certainly agree with him that in all of our countries, not least the United States, the importance of the centrality of the Arctic and the Arctic issues is really crucial for public opinion and public knowledge. All of us do an abysmal job in the lower 48 or Southern Canada or in the Nordic countries. The Gordon Foundation has commissioned public opinion polls in every one of the Arctic nations and a host of Arctic issues. The only thing that really unites everybody is ignorance and there is a tremendous need which international organizations have as part of their mandate, good ones, to advertise the agenda, the achievements, all of that, the Arctic Council has a website. Very difficult to maneuver even if you get there. So the effort on communicating the importance of the Arctic agenda and the importance of the Arctic for the global agenda is a really important job. Nobody does it, zip. I mean, CESIS has a conference today and we have a conference at Monk every year but that's a drop in the hat. So part of the argument to be made to the Arctic States around the financing issue is we all spend a lot of time working here. Some of that should go into a secretariat that can advertise what we do. So my conclusion to you is I want to go back to a large issue where the Arctic Council began which is getting away from the security dimension of the Arctic and saying we need a forum at least where that can be discussed. Then we still have some really important infrastructure issues around the Arctic Council, around financing, permanent participants and communicating the Arctic agenda to the world as a whole. Thank you, I like it. Those are great, big, bold ideas. Julie, I think there's two certainties here. Number one, the second time the United States holds the chairmanship will be far different from when it held its first time around. And the second certainty is that you are receiving a lot of advice, both outside the government and inside the government about what we should be doing for our agenda. So with that, thank you, Julie. Thank you, Heather, for inviting me to be here on this great panel today and it's a very timely topic and I'm glad to see there are a lot of people in the room. Seems like we just did this a week ago. Heather and I are getting to know each other very well. Before I start, I just wanted to respond actually to Tom's main point which is he's absolutely right that we need an Arctic security forum and there's no question about that with things changing in the world rapidly and with everything that's going on in Russia and with greater interest in large non-Arctic sites like China in the region, we definitely need a forum. The good news is we actually have, we do have and it's not surprising to me that not many people know this because they're not well-known, but we actually have three. Three military security forums that exist focused on the Arctic right now. One was initiated by Canada actually. It's the Northern Chiefs of Defense, Northern Chods for short and it has met twice once in Canada and once in Greenland and having the Chiefs of Defense get together at such a high level is a very important development and I understand that Russia is particularly happy with that forum. Unfortunately, it was going to meet again this year and it's been postponed. The second one is something that we initiated and had a lot of help from Norway called the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable and that one started just before the Northern Chods did. It's more of a, I don't know how you say it in military terms, flag level or something like that. It's not, yeah it's not the top level guys, but the ASFR has met I think three times now and they are doing a lot of really good work on topics that are not particularly threatening to Russia but that are common to all the militaries, things like communications and the impacts of climate change on naval facilities and so forth. And the third one was just created a few months ago and the first meeting was in Canada and that's called the Arctic Coast Guard Forum and that was our idea. We created it. We socialized it with the other Arctic States and in particular Russia, we went to Russia first because we wanted to make sure that they would be interested in doing something like this. And it's in a way a little bit safer because the coast guards are quasi-military but they also have law enforcement issue, law enforcement capabilities and they are military when they're called up into military, into combat situations like we've used the Coast Guard of course and the two wars that are one war now that we're involved in but the Coast Guard is much broader than military. It has lots of other most importantly law enforcement duties. So we have the three, the Northern Chods, the ASFR and the Arctic Coast Guard Forum and in fact maybe that's too many I'm not sure but for now they're all three very young and eventually maybe some of them will merge, I don't know but we do have at least the eight countries. The ASFR is the eight plus four, the UK, Netherlands, France and Germany I believe that are looking at military security in the Arctic and it's a very good place for, especially the US and the Russian militaries to talk and to keep the peace but I just wanted to put that out there before I jump in. I think most people in the room understand the Arctic Council well enough that I'm not gonna go over the basics. I think you all know what it is but I will note that and again as we all know that Canada holds the chairmanship now through next April and then we take it over so it is as Heather said at the outset 10 months away. And although the council operates on the basis of consensus which means that all eight countries have to agree to something before it can go forward if even one objects it doesn't happen. The member of the other seven usually allow sort of a bit of leeway for the the chairing state to have some of its own priorities and put their own sort of stamp on things. Unless something is really egregious to one of the countries they all kind of look the other way and let us sort of do at least a little bit of our own sort of magic on the council while the regular program of work goes ahead. For example, Canada's overarching theme is development for the people of the North and they have sort of three buckets of things under that and that was perfectly all of us supported that. It's a great idea. It's shifted to some people's chagrin some corners it sort of shifted the council away from the sort of traditional environmental focus and scientific focus and more toward an economic development focus. And that's a good thing because we've missed that in the council. We haven't really spent nearly enough focus on economic development in the North and the Canadians have really done a great thing by bringing that into the council's sort of mandate. So that's good and I suspect that we will probably in some way carry on that economic development theme. When we take over as chair, we'll have a set of sort of buckets of things as well certain thematic areas but we'll also have sort of three overarching goals and it's sort of those things that I wanted to talk mostly about today. Our first sort of overarching goal is to introduce new projects and initiatives into the council. So we want to, and every chairmanship wants to do this, you wanna find a new area that we haven't looked at yet and the council's been very busy and it's covered nearly everything there is to cover but there are a few kinds of areas that are new that we can take on and we wanna do that. And in fact some of those initiatives, new areas of work are found in the administration's national Arctic strategy implementation plan that we released back on June 30th of this year. And much of our work when we take over the chair will be guided by our national Arctic strategy as you would expect. The Arctic holds a lot of fossil fuel resources both conventional and unconventional and those resources are starting to be tapped as we all know that's one of the big focuses in the Arctic right now but there's also a lot of potential for renewable energy and clean energy and we haven't talked about that a whole lot in the council. We have a little bit. Several years ago at our initiative again and the United States initiative we had something called the Arctic Energy Summit and that was a very kind of academic conference. There were a lot of papers and a lot of presentations but it came out with a, it was a really good first time I would argue, first time really big comprehensive look at what's out there in the Arctic in the realm of clean and renewable energy. There's lots of potential to tap into geothermal into wave energy into solar into wind into all kinds of things nuclear even and there are also lots of small and rural communities in the Arctic that are off the grid that have extremely high costs of living. Local energy costs are so, it's kind of weird to think about actually when you think about Alaska which sits on all this oil and gas it's very oil and gas rich place maybe the richest in the country and yet when you get out into the bush into these remote areas their energy costs are exorbitant. Way, way higher than anywhere else in the country and that's because all of their fuel has to be shipped in because there are no roads and there's very little infrastructure so it's extremely costly to live in these remote places and we would like to do something about that if we can. So there's already some demonstration work going on up in Alaska on local energy delivery projects and actually former W. Secretary of Hays is back there and he's, he was very much behind one that we would like to expand internationally and that's the Renewable Communities, Recre, Renewable Communities, Rural Communities Renewable Energy, God, I can't get that wrong all the time. Rural Communities Renewable Energy initiative and if we can do something like that successfully in the U.S. up in Alaska and we could potentially showcase Alaska as, or the Arctic, but especially Alaska in the U.S. as sort of the proving ground for how to do local renewable energy that would be a great thing and it would do a lot to improve the cost of living and therefore the living conditions in these rural communities that have such a hard time. Information and communications technology is another area that we are contemplating looking at as probably a lot of people know there's very little in the way of coverage up there. There are a few satellites, not too much, maybe none or very few commercially capable satellites for commercial scale communications activities. There's not a lot of broadband in the Arctic. The radio frequency spectrum is in need of upgrading. There's a lot we could do up there to improve the communications capacity and that's critical because we have all this human activity coming in the form of oil and gas development and shipping and potentially fisheries one day and tourism which is already happening and we need to make sure that we can stay on top of that and we have a good communications infrastructure in place so that when things go awry, we're not working in the last century and not being able to find the people on the cruise ship that crashed into a glacier way off shore from Greenland or something. So having a good information communications technology infrastructure, something we wanna take a look at, obviously the US doesn't have endless amounts of money to go build it out, the private sector will hopefully be persuaded to do that at some point but we at least wanna assess the situation, get a good feel for what's up there and what's not and what we need to do to improve it. Another major goal of our chairmanship, so the first one was to introduce new working initiatives. The second one that we're looking at is to raise public awareness in the United States about the Arctic and why it's important to us and Dr. Axeworthy again was making that very point. We have known, all of us in the federal government who play in the Arctic and of course the state of Alaska lives with it every day, that the Arctic is an unknown quantity in the lower 48. Most people in this country I would guess unless you're college educated and you touched on this somewhere along the line even realize we're an Arctic country. Everyone knows we have Alaska as a state, they don't think of it as the Arctic. A lot of people probably don't really even know where it is because you don't see it on the weather map at night when you watch the local news, you see the lower 48, you don't see Hawaii, you don't see Alaska, you see what's going on here. So people don't even know how far away it is. There's a very little appreciation for how far away it is that it actually is above the Arctic circle in large measure and that it is a completely different universe and on top of that, people don't think about why it's strategically important to this country, why we have all these energy resources up there. We have completely open borders, not that anyone is crossing across the Bering Strait and coming in very often, but there certainly is a lot of crossing across the Bering Strait, at least in indigenous communities and who knows what could happen in the future when things are a little warmer up there and conditions are a little easier and we have a lot to think about with our 49th state. I mean it's pretty remote and pretty unprotected at the moment compared to the rest of the country. So we need to do a lot of educating and a lot of public outreach in the lower 48 about that and at the same time, the State Department will want to ensure that we are using the bully pulpit to spread that message internationally. I mean, small island developing states for when the SIDS as we call them, a lot of them are already starting to sink. Sea level rises actually already encroaching so much that countries like I think Kiribati and maybe some others are already worrying about and we heard at the Secretary's Ocean Conference last week, what are they gonna do? We're gonna have all these climate refugees who's gonna take them, where are they gonna go? How are we dealing with that? That's because the Greenland ice sheet is melting and things are happening in Antarctica and the sea levels are rising and we got a problem. So using our time in the chair to reach out to all sorts of different audiences all over the world is something we really wanna be good at and we'll be looking to not only the other federal agencies but lots of I think private entities to help us with that, to amplify that message. There's also a lot in Alaska of natural resources that people I think don't think much about here except oil and gas. You know, there's timber and there are unconventional other resources. There's all kinds of potential for using natural resources in Alaska, some of which we can't by law use down in the lower 48. I think probably this might be provocative but probably there would be interest in the indigenous communities in opening up other markets for their goods. I don't know that we would actually do something like that but there's a lot of natural resources in Alaska that we not need to be aware of as a country and why they are important to us for energy security if nothing else. And finally our sort of third major overarching goal that we wanna do when we have the chair in the council is to strengthen the form as an intergovernmental body. Another thing Dr. X where he hit on. So I'm glad we didn't even coordinate this. This is pretty good. Great minds. The council is pretty young, it's only 18 years old and it's also quite informal as compared to international organizations which the council is not. But if you think about the UN or NATO or the OECD, they're very formal, very structured bodies. The council's not that way. I mean we use those similar sorts of processes in our meetings but it's a very informal body. It's a small number of countries. We all get along pretty well and it's that natural informality that is the strength of the council frankly. It's how we get things done relatively quickly. It's how we get to do really good, robust work. We do cutting edge work in a lot of areas there that no one else is doing because we can do things fast. We have this informal relationships. We have this sort of informal way of doing work and it works really well. GAO, some of you may know in this room just came out with a report on the US's participation in the Arctic Council a few weeks ago. It was requested by several members of Congress not just the members in Alaska but quite a number in both chambers and it makes some very useful recommendations including that the US should during its chairmanship seek to have the council create criteria for how we develop recommendations out of our work. So which I think this one is really critical because when the council is producing and producing and producing we've done any number of assessments. Lawson was phenomenal in producing one of the maybe arguably the best assessment we've ever done in the council the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment a couple of years ago. And in fact it came out with fewer recommendations thankfully than lots of others have. But when we get 25 or 30 recommendations out of an Arctic Biodiversity Assessment or a whole bunch out of an Oil and Gas Assessment we don't really know what to do with those. I mean some of them are directed to government some are directed at other international bodies some are directed at the council themselves but if the US government actually was able to deal with all of that we'd probably create a whole new federal bureaucracy just to follow up on these recommendations. So what we need to do and they're all good I mean it's not that the recommendations aren't important and good but what we need to do is think of a way a process of how we narrow that down is that we get a few good concrete recommendations that we can actually come through on and actually do really good work and potentially serve as a work program for future work for the council. But right now it's just such a massive amount of follow up work that it kind of is mind boggling and AMSA in fact is the best and first example of how the council has actually created a process through the pain working group the Protection for the Arctic Marine Environment Working Group to follow them up and it's taken several years that one assessment with those 10 or 12 or 15 recommendations has taken a long time for us to do but it's created new work which is great. But so that's kind of one of the ways the GAO at least was thinking of how we could contribute to strengthening the council. Dr. Axworthy mentioned a few others. Finding ways to engage the permanent participants more fully. There are a number of foundations that have been working in that area and have recommended that we create a fund so that we help their participation on all sorts of fronts. There are some ideas floating around Washington that we've heard about creating potentially a fund to support communities in helping them to adapt to climate change. These kinds of ideas are floating around out there. How much stomach there is within the governments for doing them I don't know. Money isn't endless of course but those are the kinds of really good ideas for strengthening the council that we definitely wanna hear more of. So I've probably gone away over where I need to be but let me just conclude by saying that the State Department is very excited about taking on the chairmanship. We're really looking forward to it nervously. And we know that the public expectations are very high so we wanna continue our great collaboration with the public in particular, with our other agencies and keep developing and improving our working relationship so that we hear all voices and we have a really good strong program going forward. Thanks, Julie. That's great, thank you. Super, super. And Lawson, I'm sure you have no recommendations for Julie on what should happen. Okay, go for it. A lot of them have been covered though. Like Ken, I'm clean up here but thankfully no one took the really one I'll leave to the end which hopefully is positive. I have three what I would call administrative actions of the council. Some have been mentioned by Tom and others but you heard me say today my anecdote from Singapore where all the charts were all the maps. There's no ice and people calling it a high north and all of that. We really have to get this secretary to do something for the Artic Council. I was a little skeptical that we needed a secretariat and I wondered what it would do. And I guess hopefully it'll be in charge of communications, right Tom? And we gear this up and fund it appropriately. Probably funds the more people that have communication skills to better communicate to the world. I too go to the website and it's not the easiest website to work in the world and it doesn't have some basic geographic and basic information that we all would know. We in the room might know but 99.9% of the people out there in the globe don't know. In a lot of myths I participated with the World Economic Forum in an action group and we met in Dubai and after an hour of a group of people who had never known each other the biggest problem we said for the Artic was misinformation by the group of media. My second administrative issue is echo what Tom said the funding mechanisms for the PPs is a kind of a lingering dragging issue that doesn't get the high level attention that the Arctic ministers should give to it. If we're truly committed to the having the PPs at all of the meetings, working group meetings, the task forces and have a meaningful participation we have to figure out this funding mechanism in a better way. I know there's talk about it but maybe the United States can show more leadership there and press on that particular. It's an administrative issue but it's high profile because we have the PPs, the permanent participants, indigenous people with us. And the third action item in a way is maybe the Arctic Council should evaluate the role of the non-artic states in a more careful way and what do the non-artic state observers contribute? Not only to dialogue but to the working groups but principally to the PPs. So the direction of the real role of the non-artic state observers is just that, to observe, to be in the flow of information and hopefully in international organizations know something about the Arctic to articulate the interests of the Arctic states. But there are some clauses in the guidelines for the non-artic state observer for all of the observers about contributing to the PPs and their work. And maybe the United States can encourage more of that in its chairmanship. Evaluate, I actually think some of the non-artic state observers are drinking a lot of coffee and want their flag there and no, let's be serious about this and maybe you're not good contributors. Some are in the working groups, some are not and we should encourage, the United States should encourage particularly non-artic state engagement with the PPs and also in the working groups. Hard as it is to get these working group meetings from used to be five or 10 people to maybe 100 people but again it's funding whatever. So those are three administrative things. You heard me say that I thought that the United States should show a political leadership with the implementation of the polo code in two ways. One, if we're gonna go out and have the Coast Guard show the flag, on behalf of the United States and the Arctic States why this polo code is very important, push the implementation, of course we have to implement in our own backwaters. And that might not be a trivial exercise here in the United States in the code of federal regulations but we should not drag our feet. We should lead internally in the United States because we don't have today Arctic specific regulations in the United States maritime Arctic. So we gotta do that but also since we are in the driver's seat as chair it is a seminal historic new regime for the Arctic despite not covering the fish boats. It is hugely important and the United States is in the lead and we are a leading country at IMO. It makes a lot of sense that we have this as one of our important topics to lead in the Arctic Council chair. Second one that I have is, see if I can find it here. Well it just echoes furthering the work of the economic council. I was kind of unfortunate that I was turned from business to economic. I think the Swedes who initiated this really thought business and economic was not the same, but nonetheless we have the economic council. So what are they gonna do? And it has to include private sector. However complicated that is. I'll just give you a quick anecdote of the, back to the AMSA. We did try to foster the stakeholders and actors from the maritime industry. Hard to do. And our council didn't really encourage that but it did come to pass that a couple of the global shipping company, container company and then a global tanker company wanted to actually contribute money, funds to the Arctic Council or AMSA. So the question is, how do we do that? How do we take the money? And it did require in the end a call of me to the Norwegian Ambassador Clebsic who's chair of the Arctic Council. Isn't not necessarily a chain of command in the Arctic Council. But I just picked up the phone. We talked about that on whether there were any rules of engagement here on whether the Arctic Council, and it was discussed a little bit but we took the money because no one would write a check for 50K to actually execute and use that money easily for the scenarios development. So we did take money and it was of course wonderful and important to communicate with the maritime industry and I think more of that should happen. Business world should contribute more, should contribute more to our assessments in many different ways, particularly technical expertise. And then my final point that no one actually stole although Ambassador Baldwin talked about it today in our implementation plan for the national strategy, there's inference to have an Arctic State head of Arctic State meeting. It's 20 years after the establishment in 2016 of the Arctic Council, it's high time to have, we had lots of meetings, lots of people at all levels, generals, diplomats, how about the Arctic State leaders? It's our time, the United States to do this, 2016. The message would be to the world that we actually cooperate. We could have, of course if you're gonna have a meeting like that, you have to have something big and important to sign and maybe we could sign something on Arctic research cooperation as one example. This should happen in the United States chairmanship. I'm not naive to believe that there are complications doing that, but if I agree with Tom, if we're gonna separate out Crimea, Ukraine and not have it in a fear with high States actions on the part of the Arctic States together, it's an opportunity not to be dismissed by the United States. My guess is this, the President of the United States calls for a meeting of the Arctic State leaders. They would come. That's all I have. Fantastic, all right. Well, I wanna jump right into any questions or comments, a lot of good ideas. You could see pulling themes throughout the day and the discussion, which is great that we were building on one another. So I don't know whether you're so exhausted you can't put a sentence together or you're just going to come up with a lot of really great comments or questions, but please let's open the floor. I don't blame you for being tired. None. One. Sir, yes, please, just wait for the microphone. It is John. Hi, Julie. So I'm John Calder. Used to be involved in the Arctic Council through the AMAC Working Group and other ways. I won't give you a long story here, but I just like to recommend to Julie that you're gonna get and already have lots of advice on what to do, I mean, heads of state and satellites and all kinds of things have been on your agenda so far today and that's great. But as a former working group member, one of the things that always seemed to be lacking from these grand schemes and priorities was what do you really want? What's the deliverable you want to see at your ministerial in 2017? And if not by then, what is your timeline? And as you develop these priorities and themes, if you could at the same time visualize what the deliverable is and think about an implementation approach and if you can, in any way do it, have some of those things approved at the Canadian ministerial so you can just get right to work the next day. Otherwise, as you well know, the real working time of the US chairmanship is only one year and not two because things are due for review by January of the second year. So anyway, that's from my perspective is trying to get things done. You need all the time you can get and that means getting these little implementation things as part of your package going in. Thank you. It's always great advice and Julia, let you just jump in and you can close this out. You had said something last week, we were participating in an event together and that the timeline is at least the hope and the thinking is by the fall, by October or so six months out before the baton is passed, we may be in a position where we're after consultation with the senior acting officials, we'll be in a position to announce what that agenda or at least the outlines of what that agenda looks like. So I'd like your idea, visualize what you want that 2017 ministerial to be or maybe there's another meeting in three minutes and work backwards from there. So I'll let you have the final say and then I'll do a quick thank you to all. Thank you, John. You're absolutely right and we are doing a lot of thinking about that now, what the specific deliverables will be. We hope we have some nice big kind of exciting things. But we're drilling down on that right now through sort of the interagency process. We have a lot of project ideas floating around and I think our kind of bottom line before accepting a project idea frankly is what's the deliverable gonna be and who's gonna pay for it and who's gonna do it? Which agency's gonna lead it? Who's gonna put up people? And but yes, that's foremost in our minds is what are we actually gonna deliver in 2017 that we can look back and say, we made a difference in the council absolutely for sure. Ideally on for example, the renewable energy front, we would have a series of demonstration projects going across the Arctic and other states and those would ideally lead to investment by the countries but that would happen beyond our two years. I think for sure we'll have some kind of telecommunications assessment as a deliverable. I failed to talk about the fact that we'll also be doing some work on water and sewer that the Alaska governor has an initiative going on right now that we're working closely with the state of Alaska to take into the council as an international thing and I think we're hoping also as some deliverables to do some technology demonstrations on things like renewable and clean energy technologies maybe better water and sewer delivery technologies in the Arctic, I'm learning right now as we're preparing this that sewage management in the Arctic is really different naturally than it is in other places in the world and there are ways we can improve upon that and so we're hoping to get a lot of private sector interest in working with us and through public private partnerships actually have some good deliverables but we're still early in that process but that's the top priority for our chairmanship is what are we actually gonna deliver in 2017? And what are you going to have to complete that started under the Canadian chairmanship as those continuing priorities? Well I advertised in the morning this would be a rich discussion it certainly met that standard of incredible ideas challenging times geopolitically but enormous opportunities. Before we release you out to the sunshine and we've been trapped in here all day let me thank you so much. Colleagues I always learned so much from everyone and this was a day of learning and generosity of colleagues, panelists, moderators and of course our audience, two special shout outs to my team, James Mina, Caroline Roloff who are make this flawless, they're indispensable and my team Rob Travis as well as Andy Cuchins and his very talented staff. CSIS would not run without our wonderful talented staff so I thank them and thank you for coming. We're gonna be continuing to have I'm committing myself to public awareness and education Tom Axworthy on the Arctic and we'll certainly be doing a thank you a lot of programming in the lead up to the chairmanship during the chairmanship great ideas on security confidence building measures a lot on the maritime perspective so with that more to come stay tuned thank you for being with us and please join me in thanking our great panel.