"Through warming we will gain better opportunities to get access to minerals and oil and gas deposits, and cod is coming back to our waters too," Soerensen told Reuters on Tuesday.

"It is becoming easier to navigate on and around Greenland, and some areas that weren't accessible before have become so," he said on the sidelines of a climate conference in Tromsoe, the host of this year's UN World Environment Day.

A UN report this week said temperatures in polar regions like Greenland would rise twice as fast as the global average over the next decades, moderating its Arctic climate.

Greenland, four times the size of France and inhabited by only 60,000 people, is 81 percent covered by ice.

Its main export are shrimps and the local government, semi-independent from colonial master Denmark, is keen on bringing more industry to Greenland.

Soerensen said four firms were searching for oil and gas deposits off Greenland's shores and US aluminium group Alcoa aims to build an aluminium smelter there that would tap its clean hydropower, gained from melting ice and snow.

The smelter, whose location has not yet been decided, would boost Greenland's emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 75 percent but would be more environmentally friendly than smelters powered by coal- or gas-fired plants, he said.

Revenue from economic activities opened up by rising temperatures would also allow Greenland to cut its economic dependence on Denmark, which now funds more than half of its economy, Soerensen said.

Global warming could force Greenland's indigenous people to change their traditional culture and hunting methods, however.