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Arctic Council
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The Ottawa Declaration of 1996 formally established the Arctic Council as a high level intergovernmental forum to provide a means for promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States, with the involvement of the Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues. The Arctic Council has two primary objectives. The first is to promote environmental protection and follows from the work of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, an effort begun by the same Arctic states in 1991 to address environmental issues affecting the entire region and, in particular, to develop multilateral responses to pollution in the Russian Arctic. The second objective concerns sustainable development. This relates to the economic circumstances of the indigenous people and other residents of the Arctic in the context of preserving the environment. To these ends, the Council has endorsed a number of cooperative activities to be carried out primarily through a series of subsidiary bodies.
Arctic Council Member States are Canada, Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russian Federation, Sweden, and the United States of America.
In addition to the Member States, the Arctic Council has the category of Permanent Participants:
- Arctic Athabaskan Council (AAC)
- Aleut International Association (AIA)
- Gwich'in Council International (GGI)
- Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC)
- Russian Arctic Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON)
- Saami Council (SC)
Out of a total of 4 million inhabitants of the Arctic, approximately 500,000 belong to indigenous peoples. Six indigenous peoples’ organizations have been granted Permanent Participants status in the Arctic Council. The Permanent Participants have full consultation rights in connection with the Council’s negotiations and decisions.