Where Climate Action Has Gone Mainstream: An interview with Katrin Jakobsdottir, prime minister of Iceland.

• Author: Nichols, John

When Katrin Jakobsdottir became prime minister of Iceland in 2017, she brought to the job an agenda focused on gender equity, social justice, human rights, and climate activism.

As the leader of Iceland's Left-Green Movement, these issues had long motivated her. But as prime minister of a small country with a big influence on the global stage, the energetic forty-seven-year-old has been able to amplify them.

That's particularly true with the issues of energy and sustainability, which she has focused on as one of the world's most outspoken advocates for speeding up the global response to climate change. Jakobsdottir has pledged to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040.

In her office in Reykjavik, during a pair of interviews, the most recent in February, we discussed the climate crisis, human rights, the militarization of the Arctic, and a range of other issues.

Q: As part of a book project on how the climate crisis is changing the Arctic, I recently traveled to the northernmost part of Iceland, Grimsey Island, some of which is above the Arctic Circle. It was late winter, yet temperatures were so mild that we barely needed coats. People I talked to said they could see and feel the world changing almost in real time.

Katrin Jakobsdottir: It's quite an experience to go there, and be there, and somehow feel the difference. What's happening with the climate in the Arctic is happening at a double pace compared with the rest of the world. It's quite shocking.

Q: One point you've been making is that the climate crisis is a human rights issue--especially for people who live in vulnerable regions of the world.

Jakobsdottir: Looking at it from my political point of view, the responsibility we have toward later generations is an issue of human rights--also to those who are here and now faced with the consequences of the climate change that is already happening and so prominent in and around the Arctic.

You already see change happening in the close community in Greenland, where you have more polar bears roaming away from where they used to hang out.

Q: Aren't there cases of polar bears swimming across from Greenland to Iceland?

Jakobsdottir: Sometimes. The fishermen here in Iceland say, "We can actually see some changes happening in the ecosystem." So it's the ecosystem changing, and we need to make the connection between how those changes are happening and how they will affect our human rights.

Q: Just as you were starting to get traction on some of these...