Arctic Environmental Conflicts: Implications for the EU Green Deal

While the EU Green Deal (EUGD) has been given significant political leverage to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, it faces a booming global competition for critical raw materials (CRM) while also having to decide how to boost Europe’s production to fight its unsustainable dependency on imports while needing to avoid a growing number of legal disputes. Research suggests that global court litigation related to climate action is on the rise, with Indigenous actors and environmental groups successfully challenging government-backed plans for mineral extraction and wind farms. Considering that just a third of the concluded cases in the United States Climate Litigation Database resulted in negative rulings for climate action naturally encourages further lawsuits, a trend that I argue will be amplified by the push for mining, renewable energy and railroad expansion over vast areas of land used for a wide range of other purposes. The term green colonialism (GC) has gained traction as a political concept to oppose mining, expansion of large-scale energy production and its ancillary infrastructure on Indigenous lands. While the Nordic countries hold vast deposits of CRM key for the green transition, they also have a history of conflicts, often in sparsely populated areas, related to large-scale investments including energy production, forestry, transport infrastructure and mineral extraction. The paper examines 13 environmental conflict cases to illustrate the effects of resistance across various levels, and to identify challenges critical to the success of the EU Green Deal.