If We Can’t Stop Iceland’s Glaciers from Melting, Let’s Replace Them with Forests

Climate change is unsurprisingly impacting humans and wildlife throughout the Arctic—but the land itself is also changing drastically.

Take disappearing glaciers in Iceland, for example. The country is actually gaining land due to this melting ice, raising questions of land ownership and use, conservation, and resource governance. And given that 11 percent of Iceland is covered by glaciers, their retreat presents serious issues for the economy and livelihoods more generally.

While the country is taking measures to address these concerns, it may still be too late for the glaciers. Icelandic policymakers should look at adaptation—or managing the negative effects of climate change and adjusting to a warmer world—rather than mitigation—which involves more directly tackling the causes of climate change. Planting trees on new, rising land, a policy known as “afforestation,” is one such adaptation strategy to consider.

What Happens When a Glacier Melts?

Glaciers—whether the massive Vatnajökull or the smaller, but no less impressive, Snæfellsjökull—are significant to Iceland’s geography, culture, and tourism industry. But over the past 130 years, these natural wonders have lost four billion tons of ice, making them the fastest-shrinking glaciers outside of the polar ice caps. About half this loss has occurred in the last 25 years—amounting to 16 percent of their total volume.

The melting glaciers are causing a strange phenomenon: mass ice loss has led to the earth lifting in much of Iceland’s interior, as well as on the southeast and southern coasts, amounting to around 1.4 inches gained per year. That’s because glaciers exert significant pressure on underlying land, and that downward force is now decreasing.

This land rise will only increase as climate change worsens, resulting in warped infrastructure and negative economic consequences. For example, the rising land has already twisted underground pipes, confounding smaller towns' access to water and waste removal.

Because tourism is critical for the country, receding ice may significantly hurt the industry. In Canada, for instance, a study found that 25 percent of respondents would not visit two Canadian national parks once their glaciers disappeared. Could we see a similar trend in Iceland? And climate change will also affect Iceland’s fishing industry—another key economic sector. The land rise near important harbors is making it increasingly difficult for large fishing trawlers to enter and exit ports.

Then there’s the threat of large-scale disaster. As glaciers retreat, steep slopes that were once supported by ice become destabilized, resulting in land or mudslides. If these slides run into glacial lakes, the subsequent flooding can severely damage anything in its path. To provide a sense of the risk, a 2020 landslide in British Columbia crashed into a glacial lake, causing a 100-meter high tsunami (luckily, the surrounding area was uninhabited).

Who Owns the “New” Iceland?

So what happens when an area developed over centuries unearths new, potentially usable land? Who owns that land and who gets to decide how it’s used?

There’s been a lack of discussion in Iceland so far about this strange problem, but one property rights paradigm may provide some insight. In economic terms, it’s useful to think of glaciers as “common pool resources," a type of good that cannot be owned privately, as its size makes it costly to exclude beneficiaries from accessing it. Take fish stocks, timber, or a body of water— because these resources are generally accessible, they should be regulated to prevent overuse, so that everyone can continue using them.

For the Icelandic government, the priority policy issue of climate change suggests that any “new” land shouldn’t be sold off as private property. Instead, the land emerging from these glaciers should remain a common pool resource, utilized for afforestation and thus carbon sequestration.

Luckily, the question of glacial resource management is not under dispute, as there are already institutions and structures that help manage glaciers and surrounding land. In two of Iceland’s three national parks, large glaciers are managed under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Category II. Through this regulation, the parks are set aside for the protection of bio- and geo-diversity, ecological processes, and ecosystem support, although recreation, education, and rural development is allowed.

Iceland can also look internationally for additional ideas surrounding the governance of glaciers and new land. In 2010, Argentina passed the “Law on Minimum Standards for Preservation of Glaciers,” which established minimum standards for the protection of glaciers and declared glaciers as a public good. Taking inspiration from Buenos Aires’ legislation to declare glaciers a public good, for example, could bring more clarity on how to handle the impacts of melting glaciers moving forward.

A Potential Solution: Afforestation

Recently, the Icelandic government published its 2020 Climate Action Plan (CAP), outlining 48 actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon capture. And although the plan does not explicitly mention melting glaciers, it’s the most comprehensive domestic response to climate change to date. As part of the plan, Reykjavík expects to spend a minimum of $372 million (or 1.5 percent of national GDP) between 2020 and 2024, focusing on a rapid transition to clean transportation, as well as on afforestation.

Afforestation is the process of establishing a new forest on land that wasn’t previously wooded, and it’s a priority in the CAP. That’s because trees’ carbon uptake is an effective method to mitigate climate change, by pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and releasing oxygen through photosynthesis.

The approach was already successfully used in Shandong Province, China to rehabilitate 67,000 hectares of degraded mountainous and coastal areas. The initiative contributed to the sequestration of approximately 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over its 30-year span.

Planting new forests is also an extremely effective way to reclaim and rehabilitate eroded and degraded land. This helps to convert it into a productive and functioning ecosystem with many benefits such as increased biodiversity and resiliency.

This strategy is particularly significant in Iceland, as glaciers serve as a traditional resource for carbon capture. We know the government is capable, as well, since it planted between three and four million trees countrywide from 2015 to 2018. And in 2019 alone, Iceland sped up the pace and planted four million new trees. It’s expected that the government will increase funding in the amount of $13.7 million to the Forestry Service by 2023—that should go towards planting trees on barren glacial slopes. Additional forest cover could mean that Iceland captures a significant percentage of future carbon released in-country.

Overall, there's no way to completely stave off the consequences of climate change, but Iceland can put new land to good use through afforestation in a way that will benefit residents, the economy, and the ecosystem.

Glaciers may be melting faster in Iceland than nearly anywhere else, but it’s far from alone. Disappearing glaciers can be found across a number of countries—including the United States, Nepal, India, Greenland, Peru, Switzerland, and Indonesia. As climate change causes drastic changes to Iceland’s infrastructure, land, and people, afforestation can provide an innovative strategy for sequestering carbon, as well as a crucial guidepost for adaptation in other countries.