The Arctic Congress doubles in size as the world’s attention turns north
When the University of the Arctic convened its first members in 2001, the circumpolar North was a scholarly backwater, the preserve of glaciologists, Indigenous-studies specialists and a handful of fisheries economists. This week, when roughly 1,400 of them gather in Tórshavn for the UArctic Congress, they do so in a region that has become one of the most closely watched regions on the planet.
The Faroese capital is booked solid. Organizers, anticipating the crush, block-reserved every hotel in and around the city and put the national carrier, Atlantic Airways, on standby to add flights. The turnout is nearly twice the 600 to 1,000 the organizers had planned for. The Congress is held every two years in the country chairing the Arctic Council, currently the Kingdom of Denmark, which includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The program’s themes follow the Danish chairship’s priorities.
“This was a certain kind of explosion,” said Gunnar Stefánsson, the Congress chair and Vice-President Research at UArctic, the network of more than 200 universities and research institutions across the North.
The surge is not confined to this year’s gathering. Interest in the whole region has climbed steadily, Stefánsson said, driven by forces that have little to do with academic curiosity. The hunt for critical minerals, long left in the ground because they were too costly to reach, has turned north as the ice retreats. The energy transition has pushed wind farms toward Indigenous lands in northern Scandinavia. And the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO has set off a wave of military and infrastructure spending across the northern Nordics, and, more quietly, in Iceland, where construction tied to the Keflavík and Helguvík sites proceeds without much public discussion.
Then there is Greenland. The world’s largest island, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, has spent the year at the center of an extraordinary standoff. Through January, President Trump escalated his demand to acquire it, threatening tariffs on eight NATO allies and declining to rule out military force, prompting the largest protests in Greenland’s history. He stepped back at Davos in late January, ruling out force and announcing the “framework” of a future deal with NATO, though by most accounts nothing has actually been signed. Negotiations grind on. Questions about who controls the Arctic, long treated as settled, are open again.
Asked whether his organization now finds itself caught up in the whirlpool of world politics, Stefánsson did not hesitate.
“Yeah, yeah, absolutely, we are,” he said. The network now counts the Nordic countries’ defense academies among its members, beneficiaries of funding that “used to be a complete hassle” to secure and is now flowing freely.
“It’s a tremendous change, and it comes onto our table completely, because many of our networks and our scientists are connected to these matters,” he said.
A network built for a calmer world
UArctic was created under the Arctic Council in 1998, in an era when cross-border cooperation in the North was comparatively straightforward. That world is gone. Russia, which holds the largest share of Arctic territory and a deep research tradition, is no longer a full member, and Stefánsson is candid about the cost: long-running datasets that Western scientists once relied on are now out of reach.
He says that, at least within the science community, contact is quietly resuming.
“It’s opening up quite a lot for collaboration again,” he said of contact with Russian research institutions, “even though nobody wants to talk about it.”
What has not slowed is everyone else. Canada now fields the largest national contingent at the Congress. And the sharpest growth comes from outside the Arctic altogether: China, which has been lending icebreakers and research vessels to UArctic institutions that cannot afford their own, and India, whose interest Stefánsson ties to a striking idea, that the Himalayas are a “third pole,” subject to the same thaw that is destroying roads in Nepal and runways in Greenland.
“What happens in the north doesn’t just stay there,” he said, calling it the inverse of the rule in Las Vegas. “It happens up in the north, but it affects the south, and not least the equator, if we’re going to talk about sea level rise.”
The science under the spotlight
For all the geopolitics, the Congress remains, Stefánsson insists, a science conference rather than a political stage. He draws a firm line between it and the Arctic Circle Assembly that fills Reykjavík each autumn, which he characterizes as built around politics and, lately, a business forum.
“Firstly, these are scientists,” he said, “and these are scientists from all fields, all the way from the social sciences and through the whole package over to the natural sciences.”
The program reflects the field’s center of gravity. Of six themes, Indigenous Peoples and Northern Communities is the largest by far, taking roughly a third of all sessions, with oceans next. The speaker list still carries plenty of political weight, running from Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s prime minister until 2024, to Sara Olsvig, who chairs the Inuit Circumpolar Council, to Costas Kadis, the European Commissioner for oceans and fisheries, alongside researchers such as Harvard’s Jennifer Spence. The whole event runs under the Kingdom of Denmark’s 2025–2027 chairship of the Arctic Council, with Thursday given over to an “Ocean Day” tied to the Council’s Ocean Connectivity Conference.
What Stefánsson hopes the delegates take home is a sense of proportion about what the scramble is overlooking. He points to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the system of currents that includes the Gulf Stream and keeps Iceland habitable. Evidence is mounting that it is weakening, and yet, he says, it receives almost none of the funding its importance warrants, in Iceland or anywhere else.
“This is a real problem,” he said. “We need to do something about it, and what comes across at the conference is that no one is doing it.”
The UArctic Congress 2026 runs May 26–29 in Tórshavn. It is the fifth Congress to date and the network’s first in the Faroe Islands.
