Investable Universe Launches Provocative Polar Futures Media Series

The real assets news site Investable Universe announces the launch of Polar Futures, a media series that examines the eight-nation Arctic region’s growing geopolitical importance and its potential for attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in direct investment to develop the region and its bounty of natural resources.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210922005162/en/

Institutional investors, pension funds and other investors are eyeing the potential of developing infrastructure, shipping, logistics, telecommunications, mining, aquaculture and marine resources and of incubating technologies that aid the transition to renewable energy.

Additionally, new trans-Arctic shipping lanes made more accessible by climate change will focus competing political and military interests on the polar zone.

Nuanced insights from pivotal figures

Against this fluid strategic backdrop, the weekly newsletter and podcast series, curated by editor-in-chief Rebecca Engmann Darst, will feature interviews with pivotal figures in the Arctic discourse, including:

  • Greenlandic Minister of Foreign Affairs, Trade, Business and Climate Pele Broberg, on Greenland’s political atmosphere and the new government’s priorities for independence, social welfare and environmental protection
  • Ambassador Einar Gunnarsson, who was Chair of the Senior Arctic Officials during Iceland’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council from 2019 to 2021, on Iceland’s role on the council and its recent transition of leadership to Russia
  • Leslie Canavera, CEO of PolArctic LLC, an Alaska Native-owned small business, and Chair of the Arctic Economic Council Blue Economy Working Group, on the challenges and opportunities for AI models to support Arctic business and environmental sustainability
  • Mac McHale, CRO of Alaskan telecommunications developer Quintillion and a 30-year veteran of broadband development, on the obstacles and potential of the U.S. Arctic telecom infrastructure buildout and how the region offers a test case not only for rugged Earth environments but also for space
  • Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist and the author of the new book Imperiets Børn (Children of the Empire), on the legacy of Denmark’s compulsory integration of Greenland in the 1950s, the role of the United Nations and how these complex historical and cultural relationships might affect current and future Arctic development.

The series also will include insights about the roles of Canada, Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden in the rapidly evolving Arctic zone.

Subscribers will gain exclusive access to nuanced transnational views of the polar investment and geopolitical landscape through a weekly newsletter and podcast interviews with guests from across the diplomatic, media and entrepreneurial spectrum.

Will globalization and climate change spur great-power rivalry in the Arctic?

Noting that research from the Council on Foreign Relations examined the Arctic as a potential site for “the return of great-power rivalry”[1] amid the challenges of globalization and climate change, Darst believes that the Arctic North will be the nexus of a number of conflicts and opportunities in the twenty-first century.

“The polar region’s strategic value is hard to overstate. It holds vast natural and mineral resources and is developing new and high-tech industries in parallel to those riches. Yet in the region, there’s also an intricate tapestry of historical and cultural factors that are rarely discussed on a global level. We will delve unflinchingly into all of them in the newsletter and podcast,” says Darst.

Subscribe to the Polar Futures newsletter and podcast bundle at www.investableuniverse.com/polarfutures.

About Investable Universe

Trofast Media’s Investable Universe provides leading edge insights into investment in real assets, the global “market of things” that spans traditional investments and emerging technologies on earth and in space.

Learn more at InvestableUniverse.com.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/whats-stake-rising-competition-arctic