For decades, the Arctic has been portrayed as an outlier in world politics, where science prevails over enmity and climate cooperation trumps strategic conflict. We were informed that melting ice would force Arctic states to work together, share responsibility, and implement common environmental governance practices. Greenland dispels this illusion. What is happening on the world’s largest island is not climate collaboration, but climate competition—quiet, strategic, and deeply political.
Greenland is warming nearly four times faster than the world average. Glaciers recede, permafrost melts, and ice sheets thin. However, the environmental catastrophe is creating new opportunities for access to minerals, marine routes, and critical spaces. Climate change does not just ruin ecosystems; it also presents geopolitical opportunities.
As the ice recedes, Greenland is being recast as a frontier rather than an environmental commons. Rare earth deposits, uranium, zinc, and iron ore are found beneath newly accessible ground. Shipping routes over the Arctic Ocean shorten the distances between Asia, Europe, and North America. The Arctic sky itself has strategic value for missile detection and space surveillance.
In theory, these shifts necessitate cooperative governance. In practice, they are intensifying rivalry.
The Arctic has traditionally been governed by consensus-driven institutions, particularly the Arctic Council, which united Arctic nations and Indigenous communities to advance environmental conservation and scientific inquiry. This design was always flawed, based on the assumption that geopolitical issues could be contained beyond the polar circle. That assumption is no longer true.
After the war in Ukraine, cooperation in the Arctic got worse. There were no more meetings, no more scientific collaboration, and no more trust. Security politics and climate diplomacy are two sides of the same coin. Greenland is not a sovereign state, but it is at the centre of this breakdown. It is affected by actions it cannot control and must live with the consequences.
Right now, environmental governance in the Arctic is selective, broken up, and based on strategic interests.
The global green transition is based on minerals that are spatially concentrated and politically sensitive. Greenland contains reserves that are crucial for wind turbines, electric vehicles, and digital infrastructure. In global discourse, these are referred to as “green” resources. Locally, they rekindle traditional extractive logics such as land disruption, waste, and social contestation.
Greenland’s Inuit have often expressed worry about mining operations that endanger delicate ecosystems and traditional livelihoods. Nevertheless, external pressure persists. Strategic competition among major nations has turned resource access into a security problem, limiting the scope for environmental constraint.
This reveals a fundamental contradiction in climate cooperation: the same transition intended to prevent ecological collapse is creating new ecological constraints elsewhere. Greenland takes the burden while others prosper.
Climate cooperation tales frequently disregard militarisation. Greenland makes this omission difficult. The island is home to the Pituffik Space Base, a crucial node in North American missile defence and space monitoring. As the Arctic ice melts, the region becomes more navigable—and militarily significant. Surveillance, early warning systems, and strategic positioning are growing, not shrinking.
Environmental vulnerability does not constrain military rationale; instead, it amplifies it. Ice melting removes natural barriers. Climate change is making security competition more intense. This militarisation quietly goes against the idea that the Arctic is only managed for environmental reasons.
Greenland’s own politics hurt the story of cooperation in the country. Climate change is hurting the island’s economy, which is making people argue about whether they should have more freedom from Denmark or, for some, whether they should become independent. But being free to do what you want in a warming Arctic has an effect on geopolitics.
Greenland can’t decide its own future because the US, Europe, and China are all interested in it. People pay attention to things that are strategically valuable, and that limits their options. Climate change changes the very idea of sovereignty, pulling small countries into global power struggles while pretending to be about the environment. This is not climate governance that works together; it is geopolitics that is not equal.
If Arctic cooperation is obviously deteriorating, why does the narrative continue?
Because it’s politically convenient. Cooperation language obscures power disparities, allowing great powers to appear environmentally responsible while pursuing geopolitical objectives. It presents climate change as a technological issue rather than a political one. And it reassures the international community that climate governance is still possible—even when data shows otherwise.
Greenland interrupts this comfort. It demonstrates that climate change does not destabilise power politics; rather, it reorganises them.
Greenland faces a harsh truth: working together on climate change is not automatic, certain, or strong. It’s weak, can be changed back, and is very political. Seeing climate change as a common enemy has not gotten rid of hostility; instead, it has made room for new competition.
Greenland isn’t special. This is a warning. Greenland forces us to confront an uncomfortable but crucial truth: climate cooperation, as we currently understand it, is structurally fragile in a world ruled by unequal power and competitive rivalry. The Arctic was never immune to geopolitics; it simply benefited from a temporary convergence of interests that allowed environmental narratives to take precedence. Climate change has thrown off that alignment. We are currently witnessing a failure of political imagination rather than a failure of climate science or environmental awareness.
The Greenland instance demonstrates that climate governance cannot rely solely on consensus when strategic, military, and economic interests are at risk. Environmental institutions with little enforcement authority or immunity from security politics are readily marginalised. Rules melt at a faster rate than ice. Cooperation becomes conditional, selective, and instrumental, engaged when convenient but abandoned when costly.
Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political analysis, ESG research, and energy policy
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth