Abstract Climate change particularly affects the Arctic, leading to increased accessibility and becoming more important from geopolitical and geoeconomic perspectives, associated with increasing strategic competition. Here, we provide a quantitative assessment of these developments using newspaper-based indicators of Arctic-related climate, geopolitical, and geoeconomic tensions. The analysis shows that these indicators evolve differently over time and that the importance of geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions has increased at both monthly and yearly frequencies. The indices show distinct trend and volatility patterns across the different dimensions of media coverage. These findings quantitatively support qualitative assessments of the Arctic’s growing strategic significance. While media-based indicators capture perceived rather than objective risks, they offer a systematic and time-consistent way to map developments in the Arctic and complement existing qualitative analyses.
Rischer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.