Is it all going south? Four future scenarios for Antarctica

Abstract

The future is uncertain for Antarctica, with many possibilities – some more plausible, others more preferable. Indeed, the region and its governance regime may be reaching (or may have reached) a crossroads moment as a result of a series of challenges, including the changing Antarctic climate and environment, increasing human activity, shifting values among Antarctic states and a low-cost, somewhat benign governance regime (the Antarctic Treaty System). Within this context there are a number of interdependent drivers that are likely to influence Antarctica's future over, say, 25 years: global environmental and socio-economic developments; Antarctic governance; Antarctic research, including national Antarctic programme operations; and Antarctic tourism. The research presented here involved a thorough examination of Antarctic literature on current Antarctic developments and challenges, and an assessment of global trends. Scenarios were developed through a facilitated workshop process. From these, four future scenarios were developed based on interactions between these drivers. The resulting scenarios provide a dynamic, evolving possibility space to be explored as a means of understanding where Antarctic issues might evolve, depending on the growth or diminishing importance of drivers. In turn these suggest that more structured polar futures are needed based on formal quantitative and qualitative data.

Geobibliography and Bibliometric Networks of Polar Tourism and Climate Change Research

“…The studies are further distinguished by a matrix of their themes and perspectives on Table 1. Consistent with the keyword co-occurrence map results (Figure 3a), the largest thematic group stems from adaptation research and is mostly focused on the Arctic, whilst only a couple of recent studies [84,98], as well as a couple of earlier bipolar studies [97,104], consider the Antarctic as their scopes, all following a policy perspective. In the Arctic, demand side studies form the least interest, while diverse tourism types are in question.…”

“…The 93 synthesized articles are published in 51 different journals. Among them, some spatially focused on polar regions, such as Polar Record (n: 8) [27,29,49,72,75,84,91,94], Arctic (n: 6) [36,44,48,104,105,110] and Polar Geography (n: 5) [34,62,79,82,90], and others thematically focused on tourism, such as Journal of Sustainable Tourism (n: 7) [18,28,53,54,60,64,102] and Current Issues in Tourism (n: 5) [31,33,69,76,86], as well as those with specific spatial and tourism foci, i.e., Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism (n: 5), are prominent. Thematically climate focused journal coverage is uncommon except for one article [73] from Climate Research.…”

Antarctic Futures: An Assessment of Climate-Driven Changes in Ecosystem Structure, Function, and Service Provisioning in the Southern Ocean

“…Aside from the wilderness, the ecosystem's main attraction is its charismatic species such as penguins, seals, and whales, and cruise routes are often determined by the locations of these populations (Bender et al 2016, Deininger et al 2016. Adventure-tourism activities are extending further using, for example, submersible technologies (Liggett et al 2017). The anticipated growth in tourism is also supported by the increased accessibility of the area.…”

Diesel in Antarctica and a Bibliometric Study on Its Indigenous Microorganisms as Remediation Agent

“…This tragedy had released 600,000 L of diesel fuel arctic (DFA) into the Southern Ocean due to a 10-m tear in the ship’s hull [ 41 ]. Aside from that, in the last two decades, the number of cruise ships voyaging the Atlantic Ocean has escalated [ 42 ]. Inevitably, an increase in accidents involving cruise ships has also been reported.…”