Over Arctic sea ice, pressure ridges, keels, floe edges and melt pond edges all introduce discrete obstructions to the flow of air or water past the ice, and are a source of form drag. For most ice types, the form drag contribution to the total drag is of comparable, or greater, magnitude to the surface or skin drag. In current climate models form drag is only accounted for by tuning the air-ice and ice-ocean drag coefficients, i.e. by effectively altering the roughness length in a surface drag parameterization. The existing approach of skin drag parameter tuning, while numerically convenient, is poorly constrained by observations and fails to describe correctly the physics associated with the air-ice and ocean-ice drag. Here we combine recent theoretical developments to deduce the total neutral form drag coefficients from properties of the ice cover such as ice concentration, vertical extent and area of the ridges and keels, freeboard and floe draft, and size of floes and melt ponds. We incorporate the drag coefficients into the sea ice component of a climate model (the CICE model). This stage necessitates that small scale geometrical properties of the ice cover are related to the average grid cell quantities computed in the climate sea ice model. We present results over the Arctic of a stand-alone version of the model and show the influence of the new drag parameterization on the motion and state (thickness, concentration, extent) of the ice cover. The new parameterization allows the drag coefficients to be coupled to the sea ice state and therefore to evolve spatially and temporally. We find that the range of values predicted in the model for the drag coefficients agree with the range of values measured in several regions of the Arctic.