Eco-risks loom as arctic oil activity grows

OSLO (Reuters) – Exploitation of the Arctic’s huge oil and gas wealth poses a growing danger to an icy wilderness that can recover only slowly from heavy oil spills, a report by the eight-nation Arctic Council said on Monday.

“Oil spills can kill large numbers of animals by covering them in oil, and create long-term contamination that can affect populations and ecosystems for decades,” an overview report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), an Arctic Council body, said.


According to some estimates, as much as a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas may lie in the Arctic,.

“With rising global demand, oil and gas activity in the region is expected to increase,” the report said.

The Arctic already produces about a tenth of the world’s crude oil and a quarter of its gas, with about 80 percent of the oil and 99 percent of the region’s gas coming from Russia, the report said.

“The Arctic is generally considered to be vulnerable to oil spills due to slow recovery of cold, highly seasonal ecosystems, and the difficulty of clean up in remote, cold regions, especially in waters where sea ice is present,” it said.

Reuters