By 2030, the Polar Ice Cap has retreated further northwards, to completely free Severnaya Zemlya and to partially free Franz Josef Land and Svalbard. Owing to a combination of winds, tides, and currents, the eastern part of the Polar Ice Cap is melting faster than the western half, freeing more of the Arctic Ocean from ice in Russian territory than in Canadian and American territorial waters.
At this point, the Harbin-Yakutsk-Tiksi corridor was fully built out and a deep water port at Tiksi was built and operational. China had provided finance for the completion of the Project 22220 icebreaker programme that allowed Russia to deploy six Arktika Class icebreakers out of Tiksi. China offered funding to local governments in Greenland - but this was refused - and unsuccessfully sought to develop a tourist cruise route in the Arctic Ocean owing to the sparsity of navigational infrastructure.
The Polar Silk Road suffered a further setback at the Heihei - Belogorsk rail corridor, where rail freight passes from China to Russia. The Chinese rail system operates on standard rail gauge (1435 mm) and the Russian rail system operates on the Soviet rail gauge (1520 mm). This means that all rail freight has to be off-loaded at Heihei from Chinese rolling stock and then re-loaded onto Russian rolling stock for onward transportation.
Japan sought to enhance food and water security through the greater use of desalination technology, a focus on a greater number of salmon hatcheries, and the use of biotech to enhance the rice yields within the country. These measures largely succeeded. Meanwhile, Canada established the Canadian Water Exchange as a vehicle by which water rights were defined and traded. Other nations were sounded out about joining the CWE, but to date, only Canada was a member. The US, on the other hand, saw an uptick in environmentalism, which was directed against 'Big Oil', but which failed to dislodge the vested interests. Some progress was made, but the US Senate remains suspicious about becoming ensnared in foreign entanglements.
The European Commission, through the agency of Denmark, awarded a grant of €1.2 billion in a mixture of cash, development funds, loan guarantees, and public-private partnership deals. This helped to change the opinion of Greenlanders towards the European Commission to a more favourable one. Talk of independence for Greenland fell dramatically.
In other news, the HMM Alliance was introduced into service in 2030. The vessel, built by the Samsung Heavy Industries yard, is the first 30,000 TEU container vessel in the world. It will be transporting cargo between South Korea and California, after modifications to the local docks to accommodate that size of vessel.
This was the situation in 2030. The Polar Silk Road was starting to operate, but needed further infrastructure to develop fully. A new range of larger vessels had come into operation in the Pacific. How would that unfold in the years to 2035?
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
© The European Futures Observatory 2020
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