| Summary: | In the context of the global climate change, where the Arctic sea ice has been shrinking with acceler-ating losses in the last two decades starting to make commercially viable sea routes through the Arctic, the ARICE project aims at establishing an international cooperation strategy to better coordi-nate the existing polar research fleet, to offer transnational access to a set of international High Arctic research icebreakers, and to collaborate with maritime industry in a “programme of ships and plat-forms of opportunity”. The achievement of these goals represents a fundamental step to provide information on the state of the Arctic Ocean that is urgently needed due to the fast increase of the Arctic marine traffic. Safe navigation and voyage planning in Arctic waters as well as sustainability in operations, in particular concerning environmental aspects related to shipwrecks, oil spill risk, ship-ping impacts, underwater noise, invasive species, require improved weather and sea ice forecast, that has to be supported by investments in hydrographic, meteorological and oceanographic data. In particular, safe navigation requires additional hydrographic surveys to improve Arctic navigation charts, and systems to support realtime acquisition, analysis and transfer of meteorological, ocean-ographic, sea ice and iceberg information. Results in this direction can be achieved only through international cooperation not limited to the scientific community but extended to industry involved in Arctic exploitation and services or in some way impacted by Arctic climate changes. With the awareness that “science-stakeholder connection follows an iterative process: iteration ensures better adjustment of the research priorities to the so-ciety expectations”1, the ARICE project, starting from previous activities carried out by the Interna-tional Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and EU-PolarNet project, promoted a path of interactions be-tween the scientific community and industrial stakeholders in the Arctic which allowed to ...
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