Protecting the Wilderness

The vault that was not supposed to leak

In 2008 the Global Seed Vault opened on Svalbard, cut some 130 m into a mountain above Longyearbyen. It holds over a million seed samples from collections all over the world, a backup against war, disease and catastrophe. The site was chosen with great care, and the central reason was the permafrost: ground that does not thaw needs no refrigeration, so the seeds would stay frozen even if the power failed and nobody came back for a century. In 2017 meltwater ran into the entrance tunnel. No seeds were damaged and the entrance has since been rebuilt, but the episode is the best short summary of this topic available. The most secure store humanity has built was sited on an assumption about frozen ground, and that assumption began failing within a decade, because Svalbard has warmed by something like 4 degrees Celsius since 1971, several times the global average. That is what makes cold environments a distinctive management problem. Svalbard is protected about as thoroughly as anywhere on Earth: roughly two thirds of its 61,000 square kilometres lies inside seven national parks and six nature reserves, the polar bears have been protected since 1973, and the Environmental Protection Act of 2002 is among the strictest environmental laws anywhere, protecting even cultural remains from before 1946. Around 2,900 people live there. And none of that protection touches the thing doing the most damage, because the emissions warming the Arctic are produced somewhere else entirely. This module is about that gap: what the wilderness is worth, what is threatening it, and what management can and cannot reach.

Five terms for protecting a wilderness

The first defines what is being protected, the next two define the value being defended, and the last two are the instruments that do the defending.

Trace the threat

These six stages connect emissions produced elsewhere to the collapse of a hunting strategy in the Arctic. Put them in order.

• Greenhouse gases released largely in industrialised regions accumulate in the atmosphere
• The Arctic warms several times faster than the global average
• Bright ice gives way to dark water, which absorbs more energy and accelerates the warming further
• The area of sea ice at the summer minimum shrinks decade on decade
• Polar bears lose the frozen platform from which they hunt seals
• Bears spend longer ashore without feeding, and body condition and breeding success decline

Why is damage here so lasting?

Vehicle tracks cut across Arctic tundra can still be seen decades later. Which answer best explains why cold wilderness is so fragile?

• Everything that would repair the damage runs extremely slowly. The growing season lasts only a few weeks, so plants replace lost tissue at a fraction of the rate they would further south; the cold holds back the bacteria and fungi that would break down dead material and release nutrients, so the soil is slow to recover what it lost; and the food webs are short, with few species at each level, so the loss of one is not easily absorbed. Damage that a temperate wood would grow over in a season can persist here for a human lifetime.
• The ground is permanently frozen, so nothing can ever grow back at all.
• There are too few people living there to carry out repairs.
• Constant high winds prevent anything from re-establishing.

Read this one across

The specification note asks for wilderness value to be tied to a specific named threat rather than listed separately from it, so the rows are pairs. Each value on the left sits opposite the thing that actually endangers it, which is also how a strong answer is structured.

Match each measure to what it protects

Pair the value with the threat

The specification note for this element is specific: wilderness value should be linked to a named threat rather than listed apart from it. That rules out the answer examiners see most, which is a paragraph of reasons the Arctic is precious followed by a separate paragraph of bad things happening to it, with nothing connecting the two. Write in pairs instead. Take one value, name what endangers it, and show the mechanism between them. Not "the Arctic is important for wildlife and climate change is a problem", but that bears hunt seals from sea ice, that the summer ice is shrinking measurably decade on decade, and that bears therefore spend longer ashore without feeding. Three clauses, one pair, and the examiner can see the link rather than having to assume it. The strongest judgement available on this topic comes from noticing what management can and cannot reach. Protected areas, permits, licensing and hunting bans all work on activity inside the wilderness, and on Svalbard they work well. The dominant threat is generated outside it, by emissions from places with no connection to the archipelago, and no national park boundary affects that at all. An answer that says so, and concludes that local protection is necessary but structurally insufficient, is doing real evaluation rather than summarising. Mind the command words too. "Describe the value" wants what is there and why it matters, with no argument. "Explain the threats" wants mechanisms. "Assess" or "to what extent" wants a judgement with a stated criterion, and here the most useful criterion is whether a measure addresses a cause or only a symptom.

Complete the wilderness facts

Svalbard covers roughly 61,000 square kilometres and has a population of about _____. Around two thirds of it lies inside national parks and nature reserves, polar bears have been protected by international agreement since _____, and the Environmental Protection Act of 2002 requires permits for almost any activity. The Global Seed Vault, opened in _____, was cut into a mountain because frozen ground needs no refrigeration, yet meltwater reached its entrance tunnel in 2017 after warming of something like 4 degrees Celsius since 1971. The greatest threat is the loss of sea _____, which is the platform polar bears hunt from, and the difficulty for management is that the emissions driving it are produced _____ the wilderness altogether.

Spot the three accurate claims

Select the THREE statements that are true.

• Svalbard is among the most heavily protected places on Earth and the protection still cannot address its main threat, because national parks and permits govern activity within the archipelago while the emissions warming it are produced far outside it.
• Thawing permafrost releases carbon that had been locked away since the last glaciation, which adds to the warming that caused the thaw in the first place.
• The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognises Norwegian sovereignty while granting every signatory equal rights of access to resources, so management there has to be negotiated rather than simply imposed.
• Melting sea ice threatens polar bears mainly by raising sea level and flooding their denning sites.
• Because Svalbard is legally protected, it is effectively safe from harm.
• Damage to Arctic vegetation repairs itself within a season or two, as it would in a temperate wood.

A 9-mark assessment, marked

"Cold environments can be protected effectively." Using a case study, assess this view. [9 marks] Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago of roughly 61,000 square kilometres with a population of about 2,900, is protected about as thoroughly as any wilderness on Earth, so it is a fair test of the statement. Around two thirds of the land lies inside seven national parks and six nature reserves, which keeps habitat continuous rather than fragmented; polar bears, which breed slowly and could not have withstood continued hunting, have been protected by international agreement since 1973; and the Environmental Protection Act of 2002 requires permits for almost any activity and protects even cultural remains dating from before 1946. Tourism, which brings tens of thousands of visitors a year, is managed by licensing operators, capping group sizes and closing areas at sensitive times, so the income is kept while the disturbance is limited. Judged on activity taking place within the archipelago, this is a clear success, and the fact that coal mining has wound down almost to nothing while research and regulated tourism have grown shows the system works. However, the dominant threat is not generated within the archipelago at all. Svalbard has warmed by something like 4 degrees Celsius since 1971, several times the global average, and the September sea ice that polar bears hunt from is declining on the order of 13 per cent a decade, so bears spend longer ashore without feeding. No permit system reaches the emissions causing this, and the point was made unanswerably in 2017 when meltwater entered the tunnel of the Global Seed Vault, a facility sited in 2008 precisely because permafrost does not thaw. I therefore partly agree. Judged by whether local management can control local activity, cold environments can be protected effectively and Svalbard proves it. Judged by whether that protection can preserve the environment itself, it cannot, because the decisive threat is produced elsewhere and can only be addressed by the countries producing it. What earned the marks: a named case study with figures for both the protection and the threat; measures explained by what they achieve rather than listed; the seed vault used as evidence rather than as an anecdote; and a conclusion that answers the question on a stated criterion, separating control of local activity from preservation of the environment.

Find the two that pair value with threat

Five sentences from an answer on cold environments. Three of them state a value or a threat on its own. Tap the TWO that link one to the other and show the mechanism between them.

• Polar bears hunt seals from the frozen surface of the sea, so as the summer ice shrinks they are forced to spend longer ashore without feeding, and their condition declines.
• The Arctic is one of the last true wildernesses remaining on the planet.
• The seed vault was sited in permafrost because frozen ground needs no refrigeration, which is exactly why meltwater reaching its entrance mattered far beyond the damage it did.
• Tens of thousands of tourists now visit Svalbard every year.
• Svalbard is home to polar bears, Arctic foxes, walrus and its own subspecies of reindeer.

Build the judgement sentence

Assemble a sentence that says what protection can and cannot achieve.

Four decisions for a fragile place

You advise the authorities on Svalbard. Each decision trades something real against something else.

• Cruise operators want to land groups at a cliff holding one of the largest seabird colonies on the archipelago, during the breeding season. The income supports a town that has lost its mine.
• A research team asks to drive heavy vehicles across tundra in summer to reach a monitoring site more quickly than by boat.
• A polar bear has been coming into a settlement repeatedly, drawn by waste. There is pressure to shoot it.
• A minister asks you to confirm that, with two thirds of the archipelago protected and one of the strictest environmental laws anywhere, Svalbard is now safe.

Link the value to the threat

Using a named cold environment, explain why it is valuable as a wilderness and assess how far it can be protected from the threats it faces. [9 marks]

• Scale and population evidence the wilderness claim rather than asserting it
• At least two kinds of value, such as biodiversity and scientific value, with figures
• A specific threat to each value
• What each management measure actually achieves
• What local protection can control versus what it cannot reach