Arctic Oil Pollution and Legal Liability

This book provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of the legal liability and compensation frameworks governing accidental oil pollution in the Arctic Ocean, addressing both ship-source spills and pollution from offshore installations.

As climate change transforms the Arctic into an increasingly accessible maritime and hydrocarbon frontier, existing liability regimes face unprecedented stress. Extreme cold, dynamic sea ice, remoteness, and limited response capacity disrupt the evidentiary and operational assumptions on which international and domestic oil pollution systems were built. Drawing on scientific analysis of oil behavior in ice-covered waters, the book demonstrates how Arctic conditions complicate detection, causation, compensation, and enforcement. Through a comparative assessment of the CLC/Fund regime, the US Oil Pollution Act (OPA), and the fragmented offshore liability landscape, it reveals structural gaps in the global legal order. The Arctic emerges as a stress test for liability systems, exposing their conceptual and practical limits in volatile environments.

This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in maritime law, Arctic governance, environmental law, and energy regulation, as well as policymakers involved in Arctic and offshore governance.