Over the past decade the states governing the Arctic territories have taken on a variety of commitments regarding marine environmental management. As the first three chapters of this book have shown, several global regimes have emerged thus far. At the regional level, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) has generated a range of programmatic activities, vastly improving the level of knowledge about the nature and gravity of environmental hazards in the high North. The focus of this chapter is on sub-regional marine environmental protection, more specifically the bilateral Russian–Norwegian Environmental Commission and the multilateral Barents Euro–Arctic Region. The aim is to bring out whether and how these sub-regional cooperative processes can complement efforts at the regional and global levels.

There are several reasons for including the Barents Euro–Arctic Region in a study of protection of the marine environment, although the 1993 Kirkenes Declaration, on which the latter structure is based, made no mention of marine areas when delineating the spatial scope of the cooperation. The unsettled maritime delimitation of the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway is the main reason for not mentioning marine cooperation.

For one thing, much of the marine pollution in the Barents Sea area originates from land-based activities which fall clearly within the cooperative domain of the Declaration. This goes for matters such as leakages from land-based storages of radioactive waste and riverborne or atmospheric pollution from, e.g., the metallurgical industry on the Kola Peninsula and elsewhere.