The annual meeting of polar powers under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty – which has ruled the icy bottom of the Earth for more than 60 years for peaceful aims such as tourism and science – ends in Germany’s capital city on 2 June.

As the meeting enters its final, tense stages, host Germany told Daily Maverick it hoped to oversee conservation coups that would expand protections for the Antarctic wilderness as well as the emperor penguin — the world’s largest penguin species.  

Decisions on those proposals were expected on Thursday or even late Wednesday. And those decisions have never been more pressing. 

Attended in person by many of the treaty’s almost 55 signatories, the two-week hybrid meeting in Berlin represents the best chance since the pandemic – in other words, in more than two years – to secure conservation wins for Antarctica, a climate-threatened ecosystem that hit record-low sea ice the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Among diplomatic victories, the treaty and companion agreements ban militarisation, nuclear tests, radioactive waste, mining and territorial possession. But this year, with Russian as well as Ukrainian delegates at the decision-making table, the host nation faces the Sisyphean task of cooling the diplomatic heat. 

During a speech by the Russian delegation last week, 24 out of 29 treaty states with decision-making powers staged a walkout in solidarity with Ukraine. South Africa, which has adopted a controversial policy of “non-alignment” on the war, shunned the walkout. So did China. 

Yet, Miriam Wolter, head of the German delegation, told Daily Maverick from inside the closed-door gathering she was determined the event would not be marked as the first annual meeting in the peace pact’s 60-year history to be derailed by war. 

“Our delegation’s motto is ‘From science via policy to protection’. We want to highlight that we need the best-available science to come to good decisions that will protect Antarctica,” said Wolter, head of the International Law of the Sea and Antarctica division in Germany’s Federal Foreign Office. “It is great to meet again in person after two years.” 

Until now, Antarctica has avoided bloodshed – but last week Ukraine Antarctic programme head Evgen Dykyi told Daily Maverick that Russia’s war had already spilled onto the ice by “sequestering” their budget.

“We are holding workshops and meetings, while also considering papers about the implementation of former decisions, and making plans,” Wolter said. “At the very least, I hope we can kick off some new initiatives.

‘A very steep learning curve’

“Host countries do not set the agenda,” Wolter explained. Indeed, “that agenda is based on working – and information papers prepared in advance, and all this constitutes the substance of what is being discussed”. 

By the time the starting pistol fired on this year’s annual meeting, Wolter had not visited Antarctica, or the Southern Ocean around it. Speaking about the formidable challenge of assuming a lead role on behalf of a threatened ecosphere five times bigger than Australia, she described herself as a “career diplomat, a generalist”. 

“I have been on this job only a year now: I did have a very steep learning curve preparing everything. I have never attended a treaty meeting before, but I was tasked with this job,” she said, pointing to a “very good team I can rely on: a whole German delegation with many experts and researchers”. 

Her job as delegation head, she explained, was “to take our position to the outside world”. 

Without having set a boot in the ice-bound Antarctic – where temperatures in the recent summer soared about 40°C above normal, and shelves calved off an eastern continent once thought stable – Wolter said she had “already fallen in love” with the arresting beauty of the place. Stunning as it is, this place stands little chance of surviving the Anthropocene without the linchpins of science diplomacy being equally gripped by the urgency told by scientific data.  

Commenting on that urgency, Wolter said: “Antarctica is such a beautiful and unique world and the importance of it to our planet is really quite incredible.”

The Southern Ocean is forged by the planet’s largest wind-driven current, churning up storms of unmatched ferocity and connecting major world oceans. A rich diversity of life evolved to survive nowhere else on Earth roars and squawks the songs of the Far South here. 

And Antarctica holds a lot of ice – more than half of Earth’s freshwater. 

At warming levels of about 2°C above pre-industrial levels, West Antarctica is likely to collapse, threatening heritage and cities across the globe, according to a 2020 study by German scientists in the journal Nature. In general, scientists have warned that annual temperatures may even breach the 1.5°C mark within as little as a decade. 

An Adélie penguin snoozing on the ice shelf, Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica. (Photo: Tiara Walters)

But waddle they do for penguins?

The German delegation’s priority areas, said Wolter, have included presenting new research on how climate impacts were likely to affect the metre-tall emperor penguin. 

The very luckiest and hardiest among these birds, some suggest, can survive up to 40 or so years. That means today’s hatchlings would not be too distantly related to adults that waddled across the pack ice to appraise Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance vessel, as she was being reclaimed by the crushing grip of Antarctica’s 1914/15 summer. The wreck was found this year at the bottom of the Weddell Sea by a multinational team aboard the SA Agulhas, South Africa’s polar vessel. 

Research motivating a higher-protection status for emperors was being led by various sources including Germany and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, an independent treaty advisory body, Wolter noted.

“We want to put the emperor penguin at the forefront of this meeting,” she said. “That is also why our logo has penguins and, if you were here at the meeting, you would see penguins everywhere.”

The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition – representing NGO communities at the annual meeting – protested for such protections near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate during the meeting’s first week. Redolent with climate symbolism, their rally featured an outsize emperor penguin of melting ice. 

Spearheaded by Germany and the US, proposals to protect land areas around the Antarctic Peninsula’s Danger Islands Archipelago and East Antarctica’s Otto-von-Gruber Mountains would also be passed, Wolter hoped. 

Earlier this year, German scientists announced the discovery of the world’s largest fish-breeding colony – around 60 million icefish nests swarming at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. But marine habitats would only be considered at an October meeting of the treaty’s fisheries commission. 

Russia and China have opposed such areas since 2016, suggesting they are a Western territorial ruse drawn up along unecological lines – yet, Wolter said Germany would once again push for marine protected areas in the Weddell Sea in October. 

The German-led initiative is co-sponsored by Australia, EU states, India, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Ukraine, the UK, Uruguay and the US.

Lagging tourist laws: Cold comfort for wildlife

Rising tourism flows, especially after the pandemic pause, was another priority for the German delegation, said Wolter. 

But – for now – such aspirations may be cold comfort to tourism-pressured biodiversity that remains unprotected under Antarctic legal agreements. 

That is because – almost 20 years after a 2004 agreement was adopted in Cape Town, South Africa, to manage Antarctic tourism impacts – it was yet to enter into force going into the current meeting. The other key agreement was adopted in Baltimore, the US, also more than a decade ago. It, too, is yet to enter into force. 

A key agreement on Antarctic tourist insurance and contingency plans, among other binding measures to soften tourism impacts, was still not legally enforceable going into the Berlin meeting.   

Often lambasted for blocking marine protected areas, Russia approved both tourism agreements in 2017. According to the latest information on the treaty secretariat’s website, Antarctic biodiversity was still waiting on some Western states to follow Russia’s lead. China, producing one of Antarctica’s biggest tourism sectors, was also yet to approve the measures.

Also lacking more than three decades since the treaty’s environmental chapter – the Madrid Protocol – was signed, is an enforceable liability clause to respond to environmental emergencies. This, Russia already approved back in 2013. 

A new Daily Maverick investigation, however, shows Russia has not stopped searching Antarctica for vast oil and gas deposits and other minerals since the region’s 1998 mining ban entered into force. 

Wolter noted Germany had “started preparing a concept for tourism monitoring and this should pave the way for more targeted regulations… Some guidelines exist already: for example, on maximum visitor numbers and maximum distance to nesting birds”. At last year’s annual meeting hosted out of Paris, the German delegation also said the country’s tourism permits contained obligations set out by the agreements.

Tourism, Wolter worried, “could become too much”.

In  1992/93’s austral summer, about 6,700 cruise passengers made landfall in Antarctica. By 2019/20, that number would march up to about 120,000 feet, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. 

“Because people want to see a wilderness, they feel they have to go there,” Wolter observed. “They do not think of the fact that, by going there, it will stop being a wilderness. Naturally, science has to do more of the research so that the effects of tourism become known, and the right decisions can be taken.”

‘Refuge for all creatures’

In the meeting’s final days, Wolter said she was holding out hope for “constructive talks”.

Antarctic decision-making is based on consensus, or equal votes – if one party, such as, say, Russia, thwarted Western-led proposals, penguin protections would be left treading water. 

“During sessions that have already taken place, I can say there is hope certain countries will not block everything,” she said. “I think the meeting will not end without some decision taken. We have had some constructive discussions already.”

The bar, it would appear, was high and low. 

Success at this year’s meeting, Wolter suggested, was as much about conservation progress as it was about simply stopping a strained system from foundering.

“It would make me happy if we have taken the treaty system forward and made our contribution towards strengthening and keeping it going,” she noted.

“I’d love to see some concrete results: it is really important that there is a network of protected areas on land and at sea, so that all the creatures living there can find refuge and continue to live there,” she noted. 

“For me, it would be a horrible thought if these still quite untouched areas – as opposed to other parts of the planet… it would just be so sad if we manage to ruin that also … 

“Of course, it is not easy this year to organise an annual meeting. But this is my hope – that, after two weeks of deliberations, we can say we have managed to work together, and have even taken some decisions on how this system works; that it continues to be an example of functioning multilateralism.” DM/OBP

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