Ninety-Four Nations Sign Pact to Govern the Arctic’s Opening Sea Lanes
After eleven nights of talks in Tromsø, delegates agreed to speed limits, a shared rescue fleet and a transit levy for the communities along the route. Three of the world’s largest shipping registries have yet to sign.
The handshake came at 4.40am, in a converted fish-auction hall whose heating had failed twice in the night. By then the draft had shrunk from 212 pages to 61, the coffee had run out, and the delegate from the smallest signatory, an island state with no Arctic coastline at all, had become the most quoted person in the building. “We do not have ice,” she told the plenary. “We have a sea level.”
The compact sets a 12-knot limit through the narrowest straits, creates a jointly crewed rescue fleet based in three ports, and pays its levy into a fund run by the people who live along the route. It does not settle who owns the seabed. Nobody in Tromsø pretended otherwise.