Researcher
Gørild Merethe Heggelund
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Summary
Gørild Merethe Heggelund is a Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI) and serves as the institute’s project lead with the Centre for Geopolitics. Her main research interests lie in China’s environmental, energy, and climate policies, with a particular focus on policy formulation and implementation, institutional frameworks, bureaucratic structures, and governance roles. In recent years, she has also conducted research on China’s engagement and strategic interests in the Arctic.
Her current work focuses on China’s energy and climate policies, especially renewable energy (solar and wind), electric vehicles (EVs), and the development of China’s carbon market. She also studies China’s participation in global environmental governance, including within the UNFCCC, the Minamata Convention on Mercury, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Ongoing projects examine the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on China’s climate change policy, environmental governance, and nature conservation, as well as its evolving relationship with Africa. She has also contributed to several international evaluation projects related to China’s energy sector.
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Clear all filtersCritical Raw Materials: Interests of China and the European Union in the Arctic
In this Essay, we examine a potential avenue of future contestation in the Arctic – namely, the development of critical raw materials (CRMs) – with a particular focus on two actors with a growing interest in exploiting those materials in the Arctic region: China and the European Union (EU). CRMs increasingly play an essential role in the geopolitics of the global energy transition. In comes the Arctic region – a broad geographic area encompassing eight States that is rich in critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and REEs. However, mining in the Arctic poses significant risks, particularly to the region’s fragile ecosystem, and would require significant investments, often also involving public-private partnerships. And yet, as demand for critical minerals grows, the Arctic’s role in the global supply chain will likely become more prominent, particularly from a Chinese and EU perspective. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a watershed in relations between the West and the Russian Federation, including in the Arctic region. Once hailed as an exceptional space of regional governance, cooperation and peaceful co-existence between the Arctic States, that notion lost meaning over the past two – almost three – years.