Polar Research and Policy Initiative (PRPI) is pleased to announce that Prof Brooks Kaiser, Fellow at PRPI and Professor at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and members of the Management and Economics of Resources and the Environment (MERE) Research Group have been awarded a DFF RP2 grant for climate change and sustainable Arctic communities for the STJERNE-MIX project for 2025-2029! Prof Kaiser is the Principal Investigator, while PRPI will be involved as a project partner.
See below for what the project consortium will be working on with this exciting project.
Summary:
New energy investments that promote equity in Arctic communities with abundant natural capital require that communities have an influence on the development of resource and energy flows. Small Arctic communities can create surplus energy that can be used for Power-to-X (PtX). The investments can have a local or global impact on economic development, depending on how much PtX is allocated to extractive industries to supply global commodity markets vs. put to other, more local uses.
The application of PtX to the extractive industries in Greenland and Norway has been the norm due to longstanding center-periphery dynamics. Taxes on extractive industries have led to significant growth in Norway’s wealth. The wealth is managed in the Oil Fund for the benefit of the country, and at the same time makes it possible to control the incentives of the extractive industries. STJERNEMIX uses theory and tools from economics and political ecology to examine historical economic, environmental and socio-ecological advantages and disadvantages at local, national and global levels. The project will also engage in dialogue with Greenlandic local communities and provide knowledge that can be included in current and future decisions regarding new PtX investments and ensure that new energy expansions promote justice.
The project will develop theoretical economic models on how Arctic energy production might expand, and what previous investments have generated. These will be tested empirically, illustrating equity concerns as well as strategic economic decisions on X-factor investment and downstream resource exploitation, and expanded to include political ecological context on spatio-temporal tradeoffs informed through stakeholder and rightsholder engagement across scales to identify Just Energy Expansions. The project will use the analysis to facilitate information flows on potential development paths in Southwestern Greenland as informed by comparison with historical development paths in Hammerfest as well as more widespread Norwegian oil exploration that has funded the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Ongoing communication and dissemination with stakeholders is a significant part of the project.
The project’s results will contribute to the understanding of preferences for the distribution of resource returns, societal and parliamentary dialogues and scientific contributions within economics, Arctic and interdisciplinary research.
The Polar Research and Policy Initiative will be a main partner facilitating dialogue across stakeholder and rightsholder groups and dissemination to Arctic communities, while economists at the University of Stavanger and the IEA-CSIC (University of Barcelona) and Northwestern University will provide support and research stay opportunities for developing survey methods and macroeconomic models, respectively.
The project scope also overlaps with the interdisciplinary goals of the SCC Elite Center SOLEN to understand energy transition, and with the goals of the SCC Elite Center Aqua-NbS to understand ecological and economic impacts to biodiversity and climate from managing and developing aquatic resources. Further connections with the European Center for Risk and Resilience Studies include a focus on risks from landscape shifts due to dams as well as systemic community concerns with energy transition and transformation.
