This past week was another success for APECS in helping to shape the future of polar research - this time with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), a working group of the Arctic Council. APECS held the "Shaping the Future of AMAP workshop" prior to their conference last week in Copenhagen. Out of this came a series of recommendations on what the participants view and the most important things that AMAP and other groups can do to help support future Arctic research and early career researchers. To learn more about the APECS Workshop at AMAP and our Recommendations, click here. Keep your eyes on the website as we will be putting the videos from the workshop online shortly.
So, I thought this month would be a perfect opportunity to tell you about AMAP, as the Secretariat is located here in wonderful Norway!
AMAP is an international organization established in 1991 to implement components of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). Now a programme group of the Arctic Council, AMAP's current objective is "providing reliable and sufficient information on the status of, and threats to, the Arctic environment, and providing scientific advice on actions to be taken in order to support Arctic governments in their efforts to take remedial and preventive actions relating to contaminants".
Over the past 20 years, the AMAP has played a central role in these developments. Established by the eight Arctic Countries in 1991, and now one of the groups serving the Arctic Council AMAP is charged with coordinating monitoring and performing scientific assessments of pollution and climate change issues in the circum-Arctic area to document trends and effects in Arctic ecosystems and humans and identify possible actions for consideration by policy-makers.
AMAP has produced several highly-valued science based assessment reports over the years. At this conference AMAP will present the results of its most recent assessments,including the 2011 SWIPA (Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic) assessment and the 2011 AMAP Mercury assessment. Recently updated assessments on human health and other pollution issues such as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and radioactivity will also be addressed. The SWIPA assessment was initiated as a follow-up to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) and will produce information that will feed into the next IPCC report. The mercury assessment includes contributions to the process currently ongoing under UNEP to establish a global agreement on mercury while the POP assessment is providing data of relevance for the Stockholm Convention.
The above description was taken from the AMAP website and you can find more information at: http://amap.no/
To review the conference, click here: http://amap.no/Conferences/Conf2011/
