Polar oceans’ carbon sequestration potential trapped by colonial science-policy silos and extractivist inertia
Original framing: “Polar oceans store carbon—but policy is not yet ready to count it” — Phys.org
Indigenous peoples have long managed polar carbon cycles through practices like controlled burns in tundra ecosystems (e.g., Chukchi *qayagi* fires) and seasonal ice harvesting, which enhance sediment carbon burial. The 2019 *IPCC Special Report on Oceans* acknowledged Indigenous knowledge as 'critical' but failed to operationalize it, citing 'data gaps'—a colonial trope that ignores oral histories like the Inuit *Aviat* (traditional knowledge) records of 18th-century ice retreat patterns. The *Nunavut Agreement* (1999) already embeds carbon stewardship in land claims, yet these models are excluded from global frameworks like the *Paris Agreement’s Article 6*, which prioritizes technofixes over living systems.
The polar oceans’ carbon potential is trapped in a *colonial feedback loop*: Western science treats them as a resource to be 'ready' for exploitation, while Indigenous systems already manage them as living relatives—but these are excluded from policy.
The 'readiness' narrative serves to delay action by framing carbon storage as a *technical* problem (e.g., 'need more data') rather than a *political* one (e.g., 'who controls the land?'). Historical precedents like the *Spitsbergen Treaty* and modern conflicts over *deep-sea mining* show that 'policy readiness' is always a proxy for maintaining extractivist control. The solution lies in *inverting the trickster trope*: instead of asking 'when will policy be ready?', we must demand *whose* readiness is being measured—and by whom. Indigenous Carbon Governance Zones, Permafrost Time Banks, and Carbon Debt Swaps offer pathways to flip this dynamic, but they require dismantling the power structures that treat polar ecosystems as blank slates for Northern innovation.