In recent decades, summer temperatures in the Polar regions, especially the Arctic, have been warmer than at any time in the past 2,000 years.Footnote ⁵ Arctic summer sea ice cover—and particularly the amount of multi-year ice—is decreasing at an accelerating rate.Footnote ⁶ The mismatch between the rate of change of the Polar environment and the capacity of current international law to address these issues has led to the emergence of legal strategies aimed at catching up with environmental change. This book is therefore timely. Importantly, the contributors to this edited book consist of a highly select group of senior and emerging scholars with strong expertise on their topics.

In the book's Preface, the editors pose research questions such as “How do global institutional frameworks created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea apply in the Polar Regions?” and “How do global institutional frameworks impact on regional co-operation?” These questions are answered in subsequent chapters, with a focus on specific topics, including the outer limits of the continental shelf (Chapter 4), marine protected areas (Chapters 5, 6), environmental impact assessments (Chapter 7), migratory species (Chapter 8), shipping (Chapter 9), fisheries (Chapters 10, 11), marine mammals (Chapters 12, 13), marine scientific research (Chapters 14, 15), and maritime security (Chapter 16). In my opinion, the best has been saved for the last chapter (Chapter 17), which discusses the interactions between global and regional regimes in the Polar regions. Chapter 17 not only provides overlaps with global and regional regimes, but also analyzes potential game changers for the Antarctic and the Arctic.

Though an important contribution to the field, I feel the book has a few limitations. First, discussions on offshore oil and gas operations in the Polar regions are not addressed at all. This is disappointing, especially considering that the Arctic contains vast oil and natural gas reserves—the US Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic could contain 1,670 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas and ninety billion barrels of oil, or thirty percent of the world's undiscovered gas and thirteen percent of oil.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, climate change is rapidly making access to the Arctic marine area easier. Therefore, a chapter on the international and regional regime of offshore oil and gas operations is a notable exclusion. Second, the book has missed the opportunity to venture beyond a doctrinal research methodology with none of the chapters appearing to be based on first-hand information from interviews with policy-makers, NGOs, and other relevant parties. Third, though my knowledge of the law of the Polar region has been greatly expanded as a result of reading this book, some chapters—Chapter 9 on Polar shipping, for example—place too great a focus on describing the legal regime without providing an in-depth analysis of the interaction between international and regional regimes.