APECS was happy to have Corinne Pomerleau from the University of Victoria attend the latest AMAP meeting in Victoria Canada on February 28 to March 2, 2012.
You can read Corinne's full report here.
Excerpt from Corinne's report:
The main purpose of this joint meeting between the Climate Expert Group (CEG) and the Head of Delegations (HoDs), was for the CEG to provide recommendation to the HoDs of the priority work for 2012-2017. The CEG had to define work priorities for the next five years and had to prepare key Artic-climate related projects required to understand the ongoing processes, the effects and consequences and to produce a list of actions to be taken regarding adaptation and mitigation strategies. The CEG met a day earlier to discuss and assess possible priorities and organization issues. Several topics were presented and discussed including; Inuit perspectives of climate change, black and organic carbon, Artic ocean acidification, freshwater budget of polar region, ozone depletion in the Arctic, Arctic ecosystem resilience, role of sea ice, modeling and scenarios, earth system climate model, GRIS and land-based ice, challenges of a changing Arctic, cascading effects of climate change and feedback mechanisms and extreme events in the Arctic. In order to clarify the priority areas we created four groups of discussions according to specific topics. The main themes were physical processes, chemical processes and feedbacks, extreme conditions and ecological and human aspects. Throughout the meeting, several questions were raised especially on how to communicate more efficiently as it is key to provide credible and understandable information to the public. The CEG came up with a brilliant title for their presentation to the HoDs: Climate change impacts – first and worst in the Arctic. Scientific evidences show that climate change poses threats and opportunities to human societies and government institutions across the Arctic and globally. Accordingly, the following key themes were chosen to address both the social and science needs: (1) Arctic food/water security/human health, (2) Arctic infrastructural/transport, (3) Arctic resource access/development, (4) Weather extremes, (5) Arctic drivers of climate change and (6) Global changes. Discussion continued on the importance to make a work plan that will link the valuable information to priority issues. The CEG stresses the need to deepen and expand our understanding of the science needs and other priorities as they arise and the need to improve the modeling in order to produce plausible scenarios.
Outcome of the workshop (action items, planning of next meeting, planned report)
The AMAP CEG and HoDs welcome the participation of APECS members to their meeting as they recognized the importance to prepare the transition and the need to include more young researchers in the different AMAP working groups (please refer to their website to see the list). They are planning to enhance use of Facebook, RSS feeds and twitter in the future to adapt to younger generations. There are several meetings and workshops coming up in 2012 including the EBM and PAME ecosystem based management approach meeting in March in Kiel Germany. The next AMAP WG meeting will take place in September in Stockholm Sweden (TBC) and Russia will host a climate modeling workshop in spring 2013. APECS is strongly encouraged to send a representative member to any of those meetings. AMAP produces both scientific and popular reports that can be found on their website. The last one produced is the AMAP Mercury in the Arctic Report which was released in December 2011. Please visit their website (AMAP) to access any of these reports and for further information about the program.
