28
Revised transcript of evidence taken before
The Select Committee on the Arctic
Evidence Session No. 20 Heard in Public Questions 260 - 272
Witnesses: Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Professor Jane Francis
and Dr Ray Leakey
Members present
Lord Addington
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Viscount Hanworth
Lord Hunt of Chesterton
Lord Oxburgh
Lord Soley
Lord Tugendhat
_________________________
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director, Scott Polar Research Institute, Professor Jane Francis, Director, British Antarctic Survey, and Dr Ray Leakey, Arctic Research Theme Leader, Scottish Association for Marine Science
Q260 The Chairman: Good morning. I welcome you to what is already the 20th evidence session of the House of Lords Arctic Select Committee. You will have had a copy of all our interests, so you will know those. I remind you that this session is being broadcast. As it is 11 November and Remembrance Day, when we get to 11 o’clock I will ask that we observe two minutes’ silence. Those who are in the public gallery and my colleagues will stand to recognise that, after which we will resume the session. Perhaps we could start by asking each of you to introduce yourselves briefly and then we will move straight on to the questions. I think that you should already have some inkling that the type of area that we are looking at is research. That is our first topic this morning. Perhaps I could ask Professor Dowdeswell to start.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I am Julian Dowdeswell. I am the director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge University. By way of background, I study glaciers and ice sheets, both past and present. I have also been involved for many years in Arctic and Antarctic science policy.
Professor Jane Francis: I am Professor Jane Francis. I am director of the British Antarctic Survey. I am a geologist by training and I have worked in the Arctic on science projects.
Dr Ray Leakey: My name is Dr Ray Leakey. I am Arctic Research Theme Leader at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban. I am a marine microbiologist and a biological oceanographer.
Q261 The Chairman: Perhaps it is also appropriate that we express our condolences to Dr Leakey over the sudden death in August of the SAMS director, Professor Laurence Mee. We were very sorry to hear of that.
We have clearly taken quite an interest in research in the Arctic, both in terms of it being an area where there are probably a lot of gaps and it is quite difficult to do that research, and also in terms of it being a very international area. Perhaps we could start by asking what the priority research area for UK in the Arctic has been over the last decade. In which areas is UK Arctic science particularly strong? We visited Svalbard but unfortunately we were not able to get to the research station due to the weather. We did have some witnesses to talk to us about this area but we are interested in your comments.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: The first thing to say is that UK science in the Arctic has tended to be responsive to particular science questions rather than being driven by either research council policy or wider policy. That said, the Arctic is clearly an important part of the linked atmosphere/ocean/cryosphere system, and then some problems that relate to the UK come very clearly out of that. The way that ice sheets, and the Greenland ice sheet in particular, are responding to warming is fundamental to global sea levels and it is therefore of direct relevance to the UK and to various planning things to do with flooding in the south-east of England, for example. The same is true of the ocean circulation. Changes in the Arctic to sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets are affecting the circulation. Therefore, while the research has not tended to be driven explicitly by those questions, I think they are of key interest to scientists. Therefore, those have been two of the foci. There are more but those have been two.
In terms of expertise, the UK has a very strong reputation in Arctic science among the international community. That has placed us in the forefront in setting the science agenda in the Arctic in groups such as the International Arctic Science Committee and so on. But there is a particular expertise: in our sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets over the cryospheric part of the system, in ecology and polar ecosystems, in polar oceanography and indeed also in the bathymetry in the marine geology and geophysics of the Arctic. Those are a few of the areas that I would pick out.
Professor Jane Francis: I think also that atmospheric science—understanding clouds—in the Arctic is particularly important for climate modelling. The interaction between the atmosphere and the sea ice is also a major topic of research, and I think that we have great expertise in that. That is quite important because it is changing as the sea ice is melting. It has a fundamental influence on climate.
Dr Ray Leakey: I would add in terms of instrumentation and technology that there are some areas where the UK leads: in marine observation through Autosub and autonomous instrumentation. So the UK can contribute in those areas in which other Arctic nations may not be quite as strong.
Q262 The Chairman: Perhaps I could just follow up on one thing. Clearly, Professor Francis, you are in that position, but we are particularly known for our Antarctic science. In Svalbard it is effectively the British Antarctic Survey that brings to bear. Does that badge portray the UK’s effort as being second-rate—perhaps not second-rate but junior—to our Antarctic efforts or does it not have that connotation in any way? Is it a benefit or a bit of a misnomer, a bit of a problem?
Professor Jane Francis: I think it is a bit of a misnomer, but you have put your finger on an important point. Because the Antarctic is so big, and because it is one continent, remote and difficult to get to, the British Antarctic Survey provides the forum—the logistics and operations—for going to Antarctica. It is very clear that if a member of the UK community wants to go to Antarctica, they have to go through BAS to get logistic support. That is very visible via BAS. In the Arctic, you can actually work as a one-man band. If you get funding you can go to the Arctic quite easily—not necessarily through a UK agency that provides support, because there is not particularly one at the moment. You can work at the Ny-Ålesund base but a lot of UK scientists work around the Arctic in collaboration with other nations. That requires them to obtain funding and then to work with other nations. There is not so much coherence in the Arctic community. We are beginning to try to develop that. There is a new initiative called the UK Polar Partnership, or we now call it the UK Arctic and Antarctic Partnership. The idea is to try to bring together the whole polar community. There are about 400 or 500 scientists in the UK who work in the Arctic, but they are dispersed. We just about know who they are now through meetings that we have organised. The UK Polar Partnership is an attempt to bring together the whole community, particularly the Arctic community. Their steering committee has met within the last month and we (the three of us here) are all on that steering committee. The idea is that we will organise events and try to bring together the Arctic community to be a little more influential and a bit more coherent, with a proper strategy for Arctic science.
The Chairman: Just before we move on, it is very interesting that you mention that we have maybe some 500 UK scientists there. We would be very pleased to take that as written evidence if you had something that told us a little more about that.
Professor Jane Francis: I get that number from the Arctic Office, which sits in the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. In the last few years we have had an initiative where we have tried to get the Arctic community together in a UK biennial Arctic science meeting. It is a very informal meeting of Arctic scientists who meet for one or two days at a conference to talk about science. Over that time, the Arctic Office has compiled literally an e-mail list of people attending those meetings. There are about 400 people on the Arctic one. That is where that number comes from. We can give you that but I am not sure that it captures everybody.
Dr Ray Leakey: I would add that it covers at least 60 institutions. In some cases, there is just one individual from an institution and in others several.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could I just ask Professor Dowdeswell a supplementary question? I noted and welcomed very much what you said about focusing on the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the effect on water levels. Does anything in your research tell you what is causing the melting of the ice cap? Are you able to cast light on the vexed question as to whether it is caused by human activity or simply by some change in climatic conditions which have nothing to do with human beings?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: In Greenland we are observing the consequences of the warming, not the source of the warming. The consequences are that much more meltwater is being produced on the surface of the ice sheet. The bed of the ice sheet is also changing. That is speeding up some of the important outlet glaciers there and allowing more mass to be redistributed back into the global ocean. Of course, it is a bad art to some extent but that is another topic.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: There is nothing in your research that goes back far enough to indicate whether this is a phenomenon that has occurred before with no human instrumentality.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: In terms of timing, it is clear that things have changed markedly on the Greenland ice sheet since about 2000 or shortly afterwards. That, as you will know, coincides very greatly with the increase in the cocktail of gases in the earth’s atmosphere. It has increased particularly greatly since about 1980. So there is a very strong association between the two. The Greenland ice sheet was not a particularly active player in the global sea level story before about the turn of the 21st century.
Lord Tugendhat: I have a small question in the light of Lord Hannay’s question. I recall reading not long ago in a biography of Sir Joseph Banks that when he was president of the Royal Society he was very worried about the melting of the polar ice cap. So my first question is: as far as we know, was Sir Joseph Banks’ concern justified? Secondly, do we know what the cause of the melting at that time would have been by comparison with what is happening now?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: That is quite curious. I remember reading something very recently about Captain Cook and his non-discovery of Antarctica—of course he circumnavigated the Southern Ocean, but the furthest south he went was one of the big embayments in Antarctica. He concluded in the 1780s that it must have been a very bleak and very cold place that could not possibly be of interest to humankind. So I am a little surprised to hear that Banks was so concerned about melting. Although some decades were colder, that period was the little ice age, when the climate was a little cooler than it is today.
Q263 Lord Oxburgh: We have heard a little from you in your previous answers about co-ordination of Arctic science within the UK, but what about at an international level—does that come about? What about the International Arctic Science Committee? Would you like to talk about those?
Professor Jane Francis: I would just like to add to the last comment that I made about the UK polar community. There is a big project funded by NERC—the Natural Environment Research Council—which now has one or two years left to finish. It is a very large programme, the Arctic Research Programme, managed by the Arctic Office in BAS and funded by NERC. It is a really big programme——£15 million-plus, I think.
Lord Oxburgh: That is total, not per annum?
Professor Jane Francis: Total, yes. It involves 16 different projects across the Arctic. That is a co-ordinated effort now; it is ongoing. We have initial results from some of those projects. Those are across the board, everything from terrestrial ecology to atmospheric science to working on the Eurasian shelf looking at methane, oceanography—there is a huge range of projects through it. It comes to an end in a couple of years. It is short term and I hope that we can establish something a bit longer term after it.
Lord Oxburgh: Can we just pursue the composition of that for a minute and ask whether there is a coherence to the programme as a whole, or does it represent what are seen as the best intellectual proposals for working the Arctic from a variety of sources?
Professor Jane Francis: I think they are the best UK science expertise. Some effort will be made to coordinate results, I know, but the project is going to be extended to ensure that everything is brought together so that all the information is compiled. But is there a UK arctic science strategy? No, not that I am aware of.
Lord Oxburgh: Who would like to comment on the international summit?
Professor Jane Francis: I can start off on that. As I mentioned, I think that a lot of people in the UK do work with different countries, and we here have all worked with different countries. We have memoranda of understanding with Canada and Norway to provide support in different countries. Obviously a lot of the Arctic is territorial land around the Arctic. There is an awful lot of collaboration through scientific cruises on ships. Working in the Arctic, wherever you go, even on the land, it is remote, it is expensive and access is difficult. So, on the whole, apart from Svalbard, where you can go quite easily, most of these expeditions are quite large logistic efforts. There are a lot of people working in international teams. In fact, even the NERC Arctic Research Programme includes a huge number of international partners. In terms of IASC, I will hand over to Julian because he has had some experience of it.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I was the UK delegate to the International Arctic Science Committee for some years. One of the aims when I was on the IASC council was to try to bring together the different subgroups who were studying Arctic science—some emphasising activity in some countries, others relating to other countries and other projects—to try to bring those things together under the umbrella of IASC. Rather as the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research is the major single co-ordinating body for Antarctic science, the aim of IASC was to try to come closer to being that body. There is an Arctic Science Summit Week that happens around Easter each year when all the working groups of IASC come together. Efforts were made to try to get independent groupings like the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board to come in as a working group of IASC so there was genuine co-ordination at a high level. The marine group actually translated into an IASC working group and I think that that was a very good example of how co-ordination in the Arctic—
The Chairman: If I may interrupt you, Professor, we are approaching 11 o’clock, and perhaps we can prepare for when the Division Bells ring.
A two-minute silence followed.
The Chairman: Professor.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: There are a number of groups that meet annually at the Arctic Science Summit Week, and then task subgroups of those groups meet more regularly. Indeed I think it is fair to say that a number of quite comprehensive reviews of different areas of Arctic science have been produced by the IASC working groups. There has been varying UK participation: the UK is active in the cryospheric group, in the terrestrial ecology group and in the marine group.
Lord Oxburgh: Do any of you know about the UK’s representation on working groups of the Arctic Council?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: This is the Arctic Council?
Lord Oxburgh: Yes.
Dr Ray Leakey: Fairly sparse, I would say. Most of the Arctic Council working groups are led by Arctic nation states’ representatives. There has been some UK involvement, though, in contributing to reports which have been very comprehensive—certainly in the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna group, also in the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment programme. But it is very local.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: Somebody came from your lab, did they not, to the recent Arctic Council group?
Dr Ray Leakey: That is right.
Q264 Viscount Hanworth: I would like to follow up on the melting of the ice caps. You appear to be reticent about attributing causality. Is this reticence somewhat influenced by political considerations? I have just been reading and juxtaposing two IPCC reports—one is the provisional one, the other is the final one—and I have noticed a considerable difference, which must have been influenced by politics. Can you comment on that?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: Yes. I think it is clear that since 1980 the cocktail of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased considerably. It is clear that the ice sheets in both the Arctic and part of Antarctica—though not in east Antarctica—are responding to this. The smaller ice caps in the mountain areas of the world and in the Canadian Arctic, Alaska and so on, are responding quite notably to this. I do not think there is any scientist who can say that it is 100% anthropogenically caused or 100% naturally caused, because both those things are going on together.
The Chairman: I do not want to go much further down this route because it is not the remit of this committee to decide why these things are happening.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: You are talking about the strengths of UK Arctic science. One of the things we have been finding out is the amount of effort dealing with the permafrost, which is a huge aspect that has not had any international attention. I wonder whether you would like to comment on that. As I understand it, the Chairman has asked you to give him any supplementary evidence that you have, and if you have any evidence on that in your report it would be helpful.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: Permafrost, permanently frozen soil with just a thin active layer in the summer, covers over 20 million square kilometres of the Arctic, and indeed below the water in the Arctic gas hydrates are a part of the permafrost story too. Quantitatively it is a very important part of the cryospheric system in the Arctic. It is an area of what we might loosely call a national skill shortage in the UK. It is being worked on by a few people but it has not received anything like the attention given to the glaciers and ice sheets. We can speculate as to why that may be. It may be because it is not part of the UK tradition. Much of that land is in what was the Soviet Union for many years and was therefore inaccessible to western scientists for a long period. North American scientists in Alaska have taken a keen interest in this from the point of view of how to get hydrocarbons out of Alaska. It has not been on the UK agenda as much as it might have been, although I agree with you completely that it is a very important issue.
Viscount Hanworth: It does seem to be a major lacuna in the international science—this absence of information and science about the methane danger. Would you agree?
Professor Jane Francis: I am not sure about that. I do think there is quite a lot of research on permafrost in the countries that experience permafrost, particularly from the practical standpoint of buildings collapsing. There are some projects in the NERC Arctic Research Programme that are addressing methane. There is a group looking at frozen methane on the sea floor and imaging it. It is showing bubbles rising from the sea floor off the west coast of Svalbard but at the moment that seems to be absorbed in the sea water. There are groups working on the tundra environments in several areas in the Arctic and measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions from it as part of the Arctic Research Programme. There is also a project with the aircraft—the NERC research aircraft—that is monitoring methane coming from above the ocean in the Siberian area. So there is some research going on. There are a couple of other groups that are monitoring methane in the UK. But it is a bit dispersed, again.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: Do our scientists talk to the Russian scientists? It was a shocking business at this conference at the Royal Society in September—no Russians were invited. It was shocking and led to a frightful row. Is the NERC programme encouraging you to really make good, strong links with the Russians?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: It has in the past been difficult to work with Russia. Just after the end of the Cold War there was a period when it was actually easier than it is now to get into Arctic archipelagos such as Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya. We did quite a lot of work with the Russians at that time; a number of UK institutions did. I suspect that that has rather tailed off. I should say, however, that there have been international cruises to Russian waters, to those very shallow shelves of east Siberia and the Laptev Sea, just this year, I think. I think that the Swedes were leading that but a lot of international scientists, including UK people, were on those ships, working together with Russians. So there are examples.
Q265 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could we look briefly at the EU dimension to research spending? The EU is, in fact, as I understand it, allocating resources to that. Do you believe that the British researchers are taking the best advantage of that? As you know, British universities score extremely highly in their uptake on EU research and programmes generally. On the Arctic ones, are we maximising what we could get from that? Secondly, do you think that if the EU were granted observer status, that would be likely to lead to an increase in EU allocations for research spending?
Professor Jane Francis: There have been some very large projects about the Arctic or about polar science that are funded by the EU. There is one called ice2sea, which is looking at melting glaciers and sea-level rise and is focused across both Poles, and another one called ICE-ARC. There are several projects now that are funded by the EU. EU funding is very good for Arctic work because it allows multinational parties to work together on one project, and it provides quite a lot of funding. There are some big projects. At the current time, the funding in the EU, through the programme Horizon 2020, is not really focused on polar science, so it is hard work getting money out at the moment. We need some more influence in Brussels and in the Horizon 2020 programme to ensure that there is more polar science there in future.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Do you have any figures that you could provide us for the percentage that the UK is taking up on these EU projects, so that we could compare it with the percentage that we are taking up on other research programmes and projects to see whether our effort to use EU funds is lagging behind in the Arctic or is similar to that in other parts of the research framework programme?
Professor Jane Francis: I am sure that could be found. The Arctic Office in BAS will have information about the amount of funding that has been received for Arctic research, and it can probably compare it to the rest. But it depends on the focus of the programmes in the EU, and at the moment the Horizon 2020 programme does not have a strong polar component in it.
There is a body called the European Polar Board, which I am on, which brings together all the European countries to try to co-ordinate polar research, both Antarctic and Arctic. That is just changing its structure. But there is now an attempt to write a proposal for the European Polar Board to be recognised as the body that represents Arctic and Antarctic research. If that is funded, which I hope it will be very soon, it will provide some money for networking in the first instance to bring all the polar organisations in Europe together. From there we can build a much stronger European polar body to help to promote more funding.
The Chairman: Dr Leakey, do you have anything to add briefly?
Dr Ray Leakey: Just on the EU. There is the Northern Periphery Programme, which is now migrating into the Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme. There are territorial programmes within the EU that are also relevant at last slightly indirectly to the research that we do.
Q266 Lord Soley: I would like to pick up on a point that Lord Oxburgh raised a few moments ago about the role of the Arctic Council and its working groups. The first question is how well co-ordinated the research is that those working groups do. Following on from that, are there any areas that you would like to identify in which the UK is either doing well or could do better?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I think the Arctic Council has commissioned several reports on aspects of the Arctic environment over the past decade, sometimes through consultation with IASC, so I think there is linkage between IASC and the Arctic Council. The ACIA—the Arctic climate impact assessment—of 2004 although dated remains a classic contribution of that kind. That was stimulated by the Arctic Council, with help from IASC and other organisations. I think that efforts like that can lead to bringing in the science community, whether it is just for the cryosphere or for Arctic change more broadly, and that has been quite a successful formula a number of times. In a way, it is looking to play the same sort of role that the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research plays. That is to say that IASC can provide all the science information that can inform the Arctic Council and the Arctic Council working groups.
Lord Soley: So you are saying in effect that they co-ordinate it quite well, although they might not actually initiate it, if you like.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I think that on occasion it has worked very well.
Lord Soley: On occasion. Okay. You do not want to elaborate on the occasions when maybe they could do better?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: No. I am afraid that I do not know enough about it.
Lord Soley: Can I ask you then what role Britain could play that she has not already played?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: One of the things about the Arctic Council is that it is driven by the member states, and that is quite proper and very clearly the intention. The UK, as you quite rightly say, is an observer and so has relatively limited input. We have quite strong input where science programmes are proposed. We can then put forward the names of key scientists to take part. What I hope we have shown already is that UK polar science and Arctic science is very strong on a world scale, so we have to have world-class scientists to input into these things. That is a key role.
Lord Soley: Given the number of states seeking to be observer states—China and South Korea spring to mind as ones with a good scientific input—is it right that we look at ways in which observer states can improve their scientific contribution, bearing in mind that there will be other observer states, not just the UK?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: One assumes that the more there are the more difficult it is for any one to be heard.
Lord Soley: And therefore co-ordination is going to be a problem.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I would have thought so. I am not familiar enough with it to comment on that.
Q267 Lord Tugendhat: What use does the Foreign Office make of UK research on the Arctic? How does UK science inform the Foreign Office position in Arctic discussions? You have talked about the fact that as an observer we are marginal in some respects, but does it in fact help to support UK business and commercial interests in the Arctic?
Professor Jane Francis: Certainly the Foreign and Commonwealth Office welcomes the presence of British scientists in the Arctic. One way in which there is a UK presence is through its scientists being there. As you know the Foreign and Commonwealth Office recently produced the UK Arctic strategy, which encourages science in the Arctic. There is no funding, of course, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for work in the Arctic, but it certainly encourages support as much as possible. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has, for example, helped us with memoranda of understanding with Arctic countries such as Canada and Norway so that we can work with them and collaborate, which has been extremely helpful.
Dr Ray Leakey: A number of years ago we did a commission for the FCO looking at stakeholder engagement. One of the things that came out of that was that although we have a strong Arctic fundamental research base which it can draw upon, when it came to more applied areas of science—fisheries, transport, energy—we did not have as much Arctic expertise as we might wish for, or at least which the Foreign and Commonwealth Office might wish to draw upon. That is not to say that expertise in those areas does not exist. It does exist in other remits, but not particularly in the Arctic, so there is perhaps an opportunity to expand our Arctic expertise in applied areas that may be more useful to industry by drawing upon that expertise in other aspects of the UK research base.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: Would it not have been a good idea if the Foreign Office thought about data sometimes, because they could make a big difference?
Professor Jane Francis: Scientifically, there is a data gap in Arctic science. There is quite a lot of work on the land areas, the terrestrial areas, but there are publications that show that very few data are being gathered around the shelf and around the centre of the Arctic. So when you see pictures of the earth showing the red areas in the polar-regions that are warming up, a lot of that has been generated. They are not computer models, they are actual data, but they have been generated by mathematics and by extending atmospheric formulae into the Arctic. In fact, what we really, really need is far more observational data from the Arctic. I keep talking about this but I think it is absolutely critical. There is very good science. There is a collaboration called INTERACT, which is a catalogue, if you like, of all the research stations across the Arctic belonging to each nation. It is a big book, and scientists can go through it and ask to work in any of the bases. But there tends to be data collection in very specific places. Lots of different types of data are collected in one particular place, and there are huge gaps, in particular, of course, in the Russian area because it is such a vast area. Collecting more observational data from the Arctic is really key for us to look at in the future.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: Data collection is one part of it, but actually putting the data together is another. There are a lot of data in Russia which are held by Russian scientists but are not available to us, not necessarily for security reasons but for all sorts of reasons.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: A lot of data were published in Russia, but our scientists do not know Russian and do not get the data.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: We have a Russian cataloguer in the Scott Polar Research Institute who goes through a lot of this material, but there is a huge amount of it and we are but a small institution. But we explicitly recognise that as a problem, and one of the best repositories for permafrost literature outside Russia is the UK through our translation facility.
The Chairman: I think Dr Leakey wanted to come in.
Dr Ray Leakey: On the subject of data, it is not just about data collection in our present situation. One of the major problems in the Arctic is that we do not have a good historical record and a good baseline to draw upon of what was happening in the past. There is a paleo record, there are some historical records, but we do not have that long historical data set from which to draw. That presents problems in trying to state what a normal steady- state Arctic, if there is such a thing, would be by which to compare changes. The lack of a baseline in historical data is a real problem. That makes the current monitoring programmes even more urgent, which have to be more highly resolved temporally and spatially.
The Chairman: Professor Francis, I think you wanted to come in on that point very briefly.
Professor Jane Francis: It is not just about collecting data once; it is about long-term monitoring, which we really need in the Arctic. We know that the changes that are going on now are variable, but what is the long-term state? That is what we are missing. That is the gap: the long-term monitoring of Arctic change.
Lord Oxburgh: What we are talking about is survey science rather than project-driven science. At the moment, almost all science that is done in the Arctic is project-driven rather than the systematic collection of data. Thank you, I just wanted to be clear.
Q268 Viscount Hanworth: Are the Arctic ice-core data at all comparable to the Antarctic data, which of course have been acquired by various parties, including the Russians? What is their quality, and are they accessible data?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: The Arctic ice-core data from Greenland are of very high quality. In fact, arguably they are at better resolution than the Antarctic data because the accumulation rate is higher and therefore you get a higher resolution to the record and in some cases you can count back almost annually for thousands of years of Arctic change. This is probably the single most key baseline data set for Arctic environmental change over the last 1,000 to 100,000 or so years, but the record is shorter because the accumulation rate is higher.
The Chairman: There is one other thing that I want to come back to on Lord Tugendhat’s original question. Is there any UK body with a role like that of the Norwegian Polar Institute which specifically advises the FCO? Is there anything in the UK that works in that way?
Professor Jane Francis: The British Antarctic Survey is now extending its remit. It has worked in the Arctic for some years now, but now we are officially broadening out and extending our work into the Arctic. We have had British Antarctic scientists working in the Arctic for many years. We do not as yet have an Arctic strategy, but we are developing one. We are not particularly funded for scientific work in the Arctic specifically, so we have to do that on grants.
The Chairman: That is fine. That answers the question very well.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: One of the intentions of the newly formed UK Arctic and Antarctic partnership, which involves scientists in both government research laboratories and the HEI sector in Britain, is to provide a focus for the information that we have from various disparate although very strong scientific grants that are being worked on at the moment. The idea is that that will, we hope, develop into an institution where the FCO has a point of contact that it can come to and say, “Right. Who are the experts in this particular area?”.
The Chairman: Do you think that FCO is interested in having that?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: Oh yes, I am sure it is.
The Chairman: Okay. What about the Ministry of Defence? Does it show any interest?
Professor Jane Francis: Not in the Arctic, as far as I am aware, at the moment.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: The MoD obviously has Arctic operations involving both submarines and military on the ground, and it is interested in the Arctic as an arena and how it is changing and so on. That is important. An example is the MoD’s support for the Polar Library of the Scott Polar Research Institute to some degree, precisely because it sees the information on both the Arctic and the Antarctic as being important.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: And a lot of people in the MoD speak Russian.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: Yes.
Q269 Lord Addington: This is a more general point. How important is British Arctic science to maintaining the UK’s influence in the Arctic, and to what extent is it important to at least keep up with the other observer states, particularly those who have a good scientific base and some sort of history of Arctic science or Antarctic science?
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I think it is really important. It is one of the principal ways in which we can recognise that Britain makes a strong contribution to what is going on in the Arctic at the moment. Although we have said that there are many different groups and that they are not as easily recognisable as our Antarctic work, throughout the science community and more widely in relation to the Arctic Council it is the UK science presence, including the British base in Spitzbergen, that is one of the important things there.
Professor Jane Francis: I think that we also need to look at it in terms of the science. The Arctic is changing, not because of what is happening in the Arctic but because of what is happening globally. The changing Arctic is also affecting the rest of the globe, and it is particularly affecting the UK. Our strange weather at the moment looks as though it is being affected by what is going on in the Arctic. So we absolutely cannot ignore that area. It is a fundamental part of our whole Earth system. If we do not work on understanding change in the Arctic, we cannot answer some of the questions about how it is going to impact on the globe and on the UK. So it is absolutely vital that we send our experts into the Arctic. It would be a disaster to retreat from that area.
Lord Addington: So effectively we cannot just say that it is the Arctic. The Arctic is a good place for studying exactly what is going to happen to us in five winters’ time. It is that straightforward.
Professor Jane Francis: Yes. It is a fundamental part of the whole Earth system. If we do not study that, we will not be able to understand how the Earth system operates. You can see how in the last year or so scientists have come to believe that some of the things that are happening in the Arctic, with the warming of the Arctic, are changing our UK weather. In some conversations with scientists who are about to produce papers, they have said that some of the weather systems that we have had more recently—where pressure systems have stalled over the UK so that we have had continuous rain and continuous drought—are due to the warming in the Arctic. It is absolutely critical that we understand what is going on in the Arctic in order to understand what is happening in the UK.
Lord Addington: So it is not just a question of prestige; you are saying that it is more fundamental than prestige. You are saying that planning has a direct effect.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: The answer is that it is the most sensitive part of the global climate system and it is changing more rapidly than any other part of the globe at the moment. Given what Professor Francis has said about the linkages, it must be very important to us for that reason.
Dr Ray Leakey: And we can learn from that in terms of other areas that are going to change. Certainly in the biological round, how organisms adapt in the Arctic in a very short timescale can give us an insight into how changes in other areas of the planet may occur.
Lord Soley: My understanding, Professor Francis, is that you have done a lot of work on the history of the Earth in terms of changes in climate. When you talk about this additional research that we need in the Arctic, I gather that history suggests that there might have been very dramatic weather changes in the North Atlantic. Are you able to say any more about the work that you do there, and is it sufficient or do we need to do more?
The Chairman: We are going to come on to the question of the gaps when we come to Question 7, Lord Soley.
Professor Jane Francis: I would like to say one more word about the influences. For example, when we were both at the Arctic Circle meeting in Reykjavic recently, one of the things that came up was that deep-water fish are moving north. Fisheries around the UK are being affected by that, so there is quite a lot of commercial interest as well in the Arctic.
The Chairman: We are going to come on to fisheries right now, I think.
Q270 Viscount Hanworth: My question is primarily for Dr Leakey. What are the main gaps in our understanding of the Arctic marine ecosystems? How much do we know about what is happening under the polar ice cap? Do we understand how the distribution and the relative abundance of marine species are changing? Finally, does the UK have a role in increasing our understanding of these matters?
Dr Ray Leakey: The UK certainly does have a role. In my view, marine ecosystems are important from three perspectives. First, they are important for essentially pumping carbon down to the sea beds. There is a carbon cycling role that marine ecosystems play a role in. There is also the issue of marine productivity and fisheries, which is important. And then there is also the issue of charismatic species, biodiversity and conservation, including migrant species that come to the UK. So it is clearly an important area.
In terms of the major gaps, I think they are both quantitative and qualitative. With regard to the quantitative aspect, we really do need better spatial and temporal resolution data. We also need to be able to look back into the past to try to get a more constrained baseline as to how marine ecosystems should behave and what their natural variability is. There is also the qualitative question as to how organisms will respond to change—their resilience and their resistance. So there are two different tiers to this.
In terms of filling those gaps, the quantitative side is going out and monitoring, doing paleo studies on what past ecosystem structures were like, and essentially using that information to help validate and test predictive models.
The qualitative aspect is important. There is a lot about the functionality of organisms in the Arctic that we do not understand. If we do not understand those processes, it is very hard to embed them into models and to have the models respond accordingly in terms of predicting how ecosystems will change.
I would say that in general the prognosis at the moment is that the Arctic is a bottom-up system. It is driven by a lack of light and nutrients. As you remove the ice, you allow more light in and you will get more plant growth. That plant growth will feed up through to a more productive ecosystem. That is a general prognosis. There are some factors that operate against that and which may drive it somewhat in the opposite direction.
However, a further complication is how the ecosystem will respond in terms of the composition of the organisms. You may have a more productive ecosystem but you may not have one that looks as Arctic—one that has the same sort of components. That may present a problem, particularly for highly adapted Arctic species, which tend to rely on productivity associated with sea ice and with energy which is efficiently transferred up into larger organisms. So we may lose the character of the ecosystem if it changes, even if it becomes more productive.
Viscount Hanworth: So there is a lot more to be discovered. Specifically with regard to what is happening under the polar ice cap, are we making inroads into that absence of knowledge?
Dr Ray Leakey: The central Arctic is a big knowledge gap. Some expeditions have been through there but they are few and far between. So we know something about the biodiversity and productivity there but certainly much less than we know about the more marginal seas.
In terms of the importance of that central Arctic area, it will potentially become more important if the ice edge moves north. If that lid of ice is removed from the central Arctic, we can envisage that area becoming potentially more productive and certainly more attractive in terms of fisheries in the longer term. But there is a lot that we do not understand about that part of the Arctic.
Viscount Hanworth: Is there anything that we could do to encourage the acquisition of knowledge in that area?
Dr Ray Leakey: We have a new polar research vessel, which may be able to access that area more easily. I think that there is some interest within the UK biodiversity community in terms of going into that area. Britain is particularly strong on ecology and biodiversity research, so I think that a lot of the knowledge that we have in the UK can be applied there, whether it is basic taxonomic skills to identify the organisms that are present or whether it is aspects of ecological theory to understand how the ecosystems in the central Arctic operate.
Viscount Hanworth: Thank you. That has been very informative.
Q271 Lord Hunt of Chesterton: The fact is that there has been a huge experiment in terms of fisheries in Iceland because of the cod wars and the restrictions relating to them. Is there something that we can learn from the history of the last 40 or 50 years in moving forward to having marine protected areas? Obviously one of the big questions concerns fishing fleets going north to move into these fishing areas. Can we give very solid advice to the Foreign Office and others as to how we should be developing policy?
Dr Ray Leakey: Fish stocks do not necessarily respect boundaries. They will go where they wish to go, and the warming Arctic will change the patterns of those fish migrations. I would say that when it comes to trying to protect fish stocks, it has to be a more international approach where we work with different nations, particularly where fish stocks move from one area to another.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: But have we learnt something from the past?
Dr Ray Leakey: Fisheries are not my particular area of expertise. I would say that following a scientific approach to fisheries management is really important, as is being more cautious in our approach to taking fish stocks. Having a more sustainable approach would certainly be the way forward.
The Chairman: Could you respond very briefly, Professor Francis, because we are running out of time now?
Professor Jane Francis: The British Antarctic Survey has specialists who work on the conservation of fisheries and on fish stocks in the Southern Ocean. I think that those techniques and that expertise could be applied to the north.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton: Will they be applied? This requires some organisational change, does it not?
Professor Jane Francis: Yes, with support from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Q272 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could we look at this issue of gaps—future as well as current ones? In what direction do you think international research should be moving in terms of priorities for the future in the Arctic? I think that we have gone over some of the permafrost and fisheries gap issues. Therefore, perhaps as ancillary to that, what should the priorities be for the UK’s Arctic science in the period ahead?
The Chairman: Perhaps in the remaining time I could ask each of you to give your bullet point opinions on what you see each of those priorities being. Perhaps Professor Dowdeswell would answer first.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell: I think that we should continue our measurement and our modelling of the cryosphere of the sea ice, the glaciers and the ice sheets. The UK is a world leader in this and that work should be continued. I think that we could move much more into the areas of permafrost and methane. Also, it is very important to get at data that already exist and utilise those data, particularly from the Russian Arctic sector, which is huge. There are also some areas—for example, the sea floor in the Arctic Ocean and indeed the seas further south within the Arctic Circle—that are simply not mapped yet. We do not know what their shape is. We know the shape of the moon better than this. That is also a priority area.
Professor Jane Francis: Long-term monitoring is absolutely critical so that we understand variability in the Arctic Ocean. In future, we can do that more efficiently with autonomous vehicles and a lot more technological innovation in the Arctic so that we do not have to have expensive expeditions there, although we still need to have those. There is a huge opportunity in the Arctic for science and industry to work together. Industry could help us to do some of that monitoring and data collection.
Dr Ray Leakey: The monitoring side and the observational data are certainly really important. In terms of Britain’s contribution, we need to play to our strengths in the areas where we already do very well and where we can add value to the international effort. I am talking about the areas which are feasible for us to work in, where we have the platforms to be able to contribute to that international effort.
Lord Soley: I was struggling to remember the word paleoclimatology, which I think is your area. I wonder whether we should do more there in order to put what we have done in geological time, which is relatively short term, into a longer-term context. Is that right or not?
Professor Jane Francis: We are at 400 parts per million CO2 at the moment. The last time the Earth was in a state where it had 400 parts per million CO2 was about 3 million to 5 million years ago in a geological period called the Pliocene. If we go back and study rock records from that era—we have good records, particularly from Antarctica and also from the Arctic—we can try to work out what the Arctic, the Antarctic and the world will be like in that high CO2 world. It is one of melting ice sheets, I can tell you.
Lord Soley: So we should do more on that.
Professor Jane Francis: Absolutely. Looking backwards in time would help to give us a picture of where we are going.
The Chairman: Professor Dowdeswell, Professor Francis and Dr Leakey, thank you very much for an excellent session of evidence, which I think the Committee will find extremely useful. Thank you very much indeed.
While we change over, I remind colleagues that we are still being broadcast.