Oil and gas in the Arctic

The Arctic holds the world's largest remaining untapped gas reserves and some of its largest undeveloped oil reserves. A significant proportion of these reserves lie offshore, in the Arctic's shallow and biologically productive shelf seas. According to the oil industry, the Arctic is the final frontier for hydrocarbon development.

Hydrocarbon development and transport are already serious threats to four of the Arctic's twelve Global 200 ecoregions:

• the Alaskan North Slope Coastal Plain ecoregion (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve);
  
• the Barents/Kara Sea ecoregion;
  
• and the Canadian Low Arctic Tundra and Canadian Boreal Forests ecoregions (the Mackenzie River Valley and Delta).

In addition, oil and gas development is a major threat in subarctic Sakhalin, which lies in the Russian Far East ecoregion.

Oil and gas development is also very likely to be a medium-term threat in other arctic Global 200 ecoregions. These include the Taimyr Siberian Coastal Tundra ecoregion, the Fenno-Scandian Mountains ecoregion, the East Siberian Taiga ecoregion, the Chukota Coastal Tundra ecoregion and the Bering/Beaufort Seas ecoregion (including the Canadian Beaufort Sea).

The footprint of exploration and drilling

The Arctic is a frontier region and oil and gas development will require the building of massive infrastructure through ecologically intact areas. Infrastructure has direct impacts, such as habitat destruction, fragmentation of migration routes, erosion, gravel mining for pads, harbours and roads and draining freshwater resources for ice roads.

Its indirect impacts, however, can be just as great: creation of new infrastructure for oil and gas will dramatically lower the barriers to entry for other kinds of resource exploitation, such as logging of sensitive timberline forests, commercial fisheries, mining and other commercial use of wild species. Subsea infrastructure, such as pipelines to shore from offshore installations, can cause very significant damage to benthic organisms, such as corals, and to sea floor habitats.

Oil spill threat

Oil spills, whether from blowouts, pipeline leaks or shipping accidents, pose a tremendous risk to arctic ecosystems. These ecosystems are characterised by a short productive season, low temperatures, and limited sunlight. As a result, it can take many decades for them to recover from habitat disruption, tundra disturbance and not least oil spills.

Marine ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to oil spills. Biota at higher trophic levels, for example cod, seals and seabirds, tend to congregate in extremely large groups during the most productive time of year. This means that a single large oil spill in the wrong place and at the wrong time of year can have very serious, population-wide impacts on seabirds, fish, and some marine mammals. The problem is particularly acute in ice-infested waters: there continues to be no effective method for containing and cleaning up an oil spill in ice conditions.

What WWF is doing

WWF targets governments, international financing institutions and even some oil companies to reduce or eliminate direct, place-based threats to biodiversity from specific oil and gas projects and infrastructure. We are also working to redirect large-scale investments into renewable energy, rather than into new hydrocarbon projects.