Legal frameworks for the Arctic blue economy: risks and regulatory responses

The Arctic blue economy offers new opportunities for the global energy transition and sustainable ocean development, yet its viability depends on a sound legal governance framework. Recent practice reveals three prominent legal deficits: ambiguous treaty authorization, conflicting legislative claims over Arctic shipping routes, and the absence of cross-border coordination mechanisms. Drawing on Sino-Russian LNG cooperation (the Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 projects), this paper traces how these deficits operate in practice and proposes a four-level legal response spanning the multilateral, bilateral, national, and corporate levels. At the multilateral and bilateral levels, countries should advance cooperation in data sharing, joint enforcement, and emergency response, while deepening the interplay between existing institutions. At the national and corporate levels, countries should advance early-warning systems for legal and policy risks and promote compliance frameworks that can span the entire value chain.