I think the real challenge on ecosystem-based management again is to understand what the phrase means. The Norwegians don't even like that phrase. They like the ecosystem approach, because it's not actually management based in the ecosystem. Secondly, it's not managing the ecosystem; it's managing human activity within the ecosystem.
One of the underpinnings of ecosystem-based management is good science. As we know from most of the Arctic Council reports we have read, we don't fully understand the dynamics among the systems that constitute the ecosystems. They've identified 17 large marine ecosystems in the Arctic region. Probably not all of them are right for any kind of human activity in the near future.
But the real challenge here is this whole notion of science that underpins ecosystem-based management and what it means in terms of management, because science is good at developing knowledge and information. It's not particularly good at making choices. It helps make choices, but politicians are the people who make the decisions about competing interests. As I said, I use that analogy of frontier, homeland laboratory, and wilderness. Those are all valid ways of looking at the north. How do you decide whether you're going to drill for oil or allow polar bear hunting? There's a political decision and a choice in that, and sometimes you don't have the information. Sometimes the science doesn't tell you what to do.
So like “sustainable development”, it's a term that will evolve. There's a big report to the Arctic Council on this concept due in May 2013. It has a weakness on the science side, but on the management side it also has a weakness, because in these Arctic states we don't have civil services that are very good at making those kinds of choices on a technical basis. They are quintessentially choices that have to be made at a political level.
Ecosystem-based management sounds like a science-based process, but ultimately it's going to be very politically based, in my view.