For most of modern history, humans have looked at Arctic sea ice and asked three questions: Who owns it? Who controls it? How do we get through it?
The ice itself has never been consulted.
A new paper, Toward Rights of Sea Ice: Reconceptualizing Polar Law Through the Rights of Nature and Arctic Sea Ice Dynamics, by Mana Tugend, Romain Chuffart, and Apostolos Tsiouvalas suggests that this blind spot is not just philosophical—it is one reason Arctic governance is failing.
Their proposal, published in the Yearbook of Polar Law published by the Polar Law Institute, is simple in concept and disruptive in effect: treat Arctic sea ice as something with intrinsic legal value, using the “Rights of Nature” approach, rather than as an inert object managed solely through state power.
At present, international law barely knows what sea ice is. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ice mainly appears as a problem: a navigational danger and a justification for extra coastal-state regulation. Article 234 allows countries to impose special rules in ice-covered waters because pollution in such conditions is especially damaging.
Notice what is missing. Ice matters only because it threatens ships, not because it stabilises the climate, supports ecosystems, or sustains Indigenous cultures. Legally speaking, ice exists as an obstacle, not as a living component of Earth’s life-support system.
This narrow framing creates a paradox. As climate change melts Arctic ice, the very legal provisions triggered by the presence of ice become harder to apply. Less ice can mean less special authority. In effect, the law weakens as the crisis deepens.
The authors argue this problem flows from a deeper assumption: polar law is built almost entirely around state sovereignty. States are treated as the only meaningful actors. Nature is background scenery.
The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement challenges that assumption.
In countries ranging from Ecuador to New Zealand, rivers, forests, and ecosystems have been granted legal rights — such as the right to exist, regenerate, and be restored. These rights do not make nature human. They acknowledge that some parts of the natural world deserve protection because they matter in themselves, not only because they serve people.
Applying this logic to sea ice would mean recognising it as more than frozen water. Ice would be understood as a dynamic system with its own ecological role and integrity. Law would no longer ask only how humans may use ice-covered waters, but also how human activity affects the ice as a system.
That shift matters because today’s governance model treats ice as geopolitical real estate. For more than a century, states have experimented with labelling ice as “quasi-land”, “permanent ice”, or “immobile ”ice”—conceptual gymnastics aimed at extending jurisdiction northward. Ice becomes a tool for claiming space.
Under a Rights of Nature lens, that logic flips. The central question becomes not how far sovereignty extends over ice, but what obligations humans have toward ice.
This reframing also aligns more closely with Indigenous perspectives. Many Arctic Indigenous communities view sea ice as a place of travel, hunting, social life, and cultural meaning. It is neither land nor sea, but something in between. Their legal traditions emphasise relationships and responsibility, not ownership.
Recognising rights of sea ice would bring international law closer to these long-standing worldviews instead of continuing to overwrite them.
The paper does not pretend that giving rights to ice is easy. Who would represent sea ice? Courts? Guardians? Indigenous institutions? International bodies?
These are hard questions. But the authors argue that difficulty is not a reason for dismissal. Law already grants personhood to corporations — abstract entities designed to concentrate economic power. Extending legal status to ecosystems is, by comparison, a modest step.
Importantly, the authors do not call for scrapping UNCLOS or negotiating a brand-new global treaty. They note that UNCLOS is often described as a “living treaty”, capable of evolving through interpretation. A Rights of Nature approach could influence how existing provisions, especially Article 234, are read and applied.
Such an evolution would also challenge the idea that the high seas are legal empty space. Large portions of Arctic ice lie beyond national jurisdictions. At present, these areas are governed mostly by general freedoms and weak environmental obligations. If sea ice itself were recognised as a rights-bearing entity, those spaces would no longer be treated as legal voids.
The paper is clear-eyed about political reality. Arctic states have strong economic and strategic interests in shipping routes, minerals, and hydrocarbons. Rights of Nature will not dissolve those interests overnight. But ideas shape what becomes politically imaginable.
A century ago, the notion that Indigenous peoples held enforceable rights under international law was marginal. Today it is mainstream, even if imperfectly implemented.
The authors’ core message is not that sea ice will soon appear in court. It is that Arctic law is stuck in a worldview that cannot cope with ecological collapse. As long as ice is treated mainly as a hazard, a surface, or a resource, legal systems will keep managing symptoms rather than causes.
Reframing sea ice as a rights-bearing entity forces a different starting point. It asks lawmakers to recognise that the Arctic is not a chessboard of competing sovereignties, but a living system on which all those sovereignties depend.
In that sense, the proposal is less about giving ice “human-style” rights and more about giving law a reality check. The ice is already shaping human futures. The question is whether law will continue to pretend it is just in the way.
