I haven’t said anything about why I’m in Winnipeg . So what exactly what am I doing in this city in Manitoba, on the Canadian prairie?

I have an internship this summer at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). IISD is dedicated to precisely the kind of issues I care about: climate change mitigation and adaptation, natural resource management, sustainable international development and trade and more. I’m very happy (and lucky I gather) to be there, although it means I have to be away from Jenna and the two furballs for until the end of August (Jenna will hopefully visit :).

While I’m here I’m going to research Arctic governance. There’s been a lot of noise over who get’s the right to the fabulous riches hiding under the Arctic seabed (or not: the calculations by the US Geological Survey about how much oil and gas there is under there are pretty sketchy (I’ll find a source for this later)). At any rate, the polar bear care very little about the sabre rattling by the Great Powers and more about what’s happening to it’s habitat — the ice. There are some serious environmental challenges that will have to be resolved in the Arctic. Not just climate change, which will hit the Arctic and its inhabitants both human and animal disproportionately hard, but also pollution, increased shipping and overfishing. And this is where I come in; I will be writing recommendations for where the Canadian government should put its resources in the future. Principally, that means recommending that Canada continues its tradition as a multilateralist and internationalist, and put its weight behind the Arctic Council — the environmental governance and cooperation agency of the Arctic.

I have some other tasks too, relating mostly to updating and playing with a community website for Arctic youth (ookpik.org).

And that’s how I came to be here.