Five Arctic coastal nations agreed on Wednesday to let the UN rule on conflicting territorial claims on the region's seabed, which may hold up to one fourth of the world's undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves. "We affirmed our commitment to the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims," US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told a news conference. Ministers from Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States met in Greenland for a two-day summit to discuss sovereignty over the Arctic Ocean seabed.

The arctic fox is inching back from the brink of extinction in the Nordic region, but intensive conservation efforts must continue if the species is to survive in the longer term, a report said on Tuesday. The Swedish-Finnish-Norwegian Arctic Fox Project has managed to double the number of breeding foxes since starting in 1998, it said in its report. "We have succeeded in saving the arctic fox and getting the population to grow," said Professor Anders Angerbjorn, who leads the project.

A major environmental group formally urged Ottawa on Tuesday not to proceed with plans to sell oil and gas rights in the Beaufort Sea in Canada's Arctic, saying not enough had been done to protect the area's wildlife. WWF-Canada said the planned June 2 sale contravenes a law that requires a management plan to be set up for the region before the rights can be sold.

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The Bush administration on Friday proposed keeping potentially oil-rich wetlands in Arctic Alaska off-limits to drilling because of their ecological sensitivity, a reversal of its earlier plan. The Bureau of Land Management proposed a 10-year leasing moratorium for 430,000 acres of wetlands north and east of vast Teshekpuk Lake in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Environmentalists and local groups hailed the decision.

Almost all the Arctic nations are stepping up activities to shore up their positions in the future debates on the possession of the Arctic resources. The Arctic countries may violate one another's exclusive economic zones Russia has the strongest position in the Arctic for protecting its interests and increasing its influence there

Oil drilling in the Arctic may need to slow down, now that polar bears, iconic symbols of global warming, are headed for protection under the US Endangered Species Act, experts said. US Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne this week added polar bears to the list of threatened animals under the act because their sea ice habitat is rapidly melting -- a move that comes just as the oil industry is pushing into offshore Arctic Alaska frontiers.

JUNEAU, Alaska: Conservationists swoon at the possibility of it all. Here in Alaska, where melting arctic ice and eroding coastlines have made global warming an urgent threat, this little city has cut its electricity use by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, instantly establishing itself as a role model for how to go green, and fast.