Allocation of Disputable Zones in the Arctic Region

As a result of the climate change the situation in Arctic area leads to several important consequences. On the one hand, fossil fuels can be exploited much easier than before. On the other hand, their excavation leads to serious potential threats to fishing by changing natural habitats which in turn creates serious damage to the countries’ economies. Another set of problems arises due to the extension of navigable season for shipping routes. Thus, there are already discussions on how should resources be allocated among countries. In Aleskerov and Victorova (An analysis of potential conflict zones in the Arctic Region, HSE Publishing House, Moscow, 2015) a model was presented analyzing preferences of the countries interested in natural resources and revealing potential conflicts among them. We present several areas allocation models based on different preferences over resources among interested countries. As a result, we constructed several allocations where areas are assigned to countries with respect to the distance or the total interest, or according to the procedure which is counterpart of the Adjusted Winner procedure. We consider this work as an attempt to help decision-making authorities in their complex work on adjusting preferences and conducting negotiations in the Arctic zone. We would like to emphasize that these models can be easily extended to larger number of parameters, to the case when some areas for some reasons should be excluded from consideration, to the case with ‘weighted’ preferences with respect to some parameters. And we strongly believe that such models and evaluations based on them can be helpful for the process of corresponding decision making.