D2.1 Report on prioritised objectives in polar research

• Main Author: EU-PolarNet Consortium
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/5118869; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5118869

Polar issues have been rising up the political agenda across Europe over the past decade since the rapid changes occurring in the Polar Regions are significantly influencing global climate with consequences for global society. The European Union and its executive body, the European Commission (EC), attribute an increasing importance to science and innovation in the high latitudes for a variety of reasons. In this framework, EC has launched a five-year coordination and support action “EU-PolarNet – Connecting Science with Society”, which will work in close cooperation with the EC in shaping Europe’s polar research and policy agenda. EU-PolarNet will establish an ongoing dialogue between policymakers, business and industry leaders, local communities and scientists to increase mutual understanding and identify new ways of working that will deliver economic and societal benefits. The results of this dialogue will be brought together in a plan for an Integrated European Research Programme for the Antarctic and the Arctic that will be co-designed with all relevant stakeholders and coordinated with the activities of many other polar research nations beyond Europe. As a first step, the project consortium has been tasked to compile a set of European research priorities for the Polar Regions, which shall serve as a basis for the upcoming research planning process in EU-PolarNet. These priorities have been identified by a desk study based on publications of national Polar strategies, international consortia and major scientific clusters. The list of the consulted documents is reported in the Annex. Through a complex step-by-step process, all polar research strategic documents have been analysed. A huge amount of relevant information has been extracted, processed, harmonized and synthetized into ten overarching topics. Each topic includes several keyquestions, which are summarizing the hundreds of key questions and priorities of the background documents. A paragraph describing the relevant Societal Challenges connected to ...