24 March 2024 | 10:30 - 12:30 (UK)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: Nelson (St Leonards)
Organiser: Carlo Barbante, Warren Cairns (Italian National Research Council, Institute of Polar Sciences, Italy)
Event Description:
This workshop is to present the work carried out by the European scientific community (EU-PolarNet) on identifying and shaping future polar research priorities.
EU-PolarNet 2 is a consortium of 25 partners representing EU member states and associated partners, with the aim of establishing and sustaining an inclusive platform for the co-development and advancement of European Polar research actions and to give evidence-based advice to policy making processes. Building on the Integrated European Polar Research Programme (EPRP), the output of the previous project, a research prioritisation action has been devised to identify specific topics in the six research needs identified in the EPRP.
The research prioritisation action was implemented through a three-step process:
- (1) Relevant background documents, service projects, stakeholder meetings, surveys from within the EU Polar Cluster and a consultation from a specially constituted Polar Expert Group (PEG), contributed to creating a starting information base;
- (2) A deep and extensive analysis based on an objective text data mining methodology reduced the very large list of topics into research needs and associated key questions;
- (3) During the thematic retreat, a group of experts, using the results from step 2, consolidated and ranked the relevant topics. A short and exhaustive description of each selected topic was made based on a defined template.
The aim of this meeting is to present details of this three-step process, as well as present the final results achieved during the prioritisation exercise. We hope to start a fruitful discussion and collect comments from the international science community to obtain a consensus on our results. At the same time we will start to make connections between the metrics of EU-PolarNet 2 (research needs and key questions) with those of ICARP IV (7 topic areas of interest). The meeting will secure the results of EU-PolarNet 2 as an important contribution to the ICARP IV process.