Project Overview for Arctic Council Working Groups and Permanent Participants

A key player in the support of multinational engagement for sustained and coordinated pan-Arctic observing and data-sharing systems is Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON), jointly co-sponsored by the Arctic Council and IASC for a number of years. To enhance integration of international environmental observing systems for the Arctic and to enable greater European support of SAON, the EU granted 15 million EURO in funding for the Horizon 2020 project: Arctic PASSION. The project includes 35 partners from 17 countries and is led by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (www.arcticpassion.eu).

Arctic PASSION started in 2021 and will end in December 2025. The AMAP Secretariat, which serves as the Secretariat for SAON, joined the Arctic PASSION project as a 
partner with the goal of further developing and enhancing SAON. In this role, the AMAP Secretariat also offered to establish a dialogue among the Arctic Council (AC) and its six Working Groups (WGs) to provide information on Arctic PASSION activities of relevance to the AC and its WGs, as well as to receive feedback and suggestions for further work in the project. However, owing to the pause in the work of the Arctic Council and its Working Groups for an extensive period starting in March 2022, the original aim of Task 7.2 of Work Package 7 to establish this dialogue and feedback mechanism was not able to be implemented according to the time frame envisaged.

This situation is gradually changing and there is now, near the end of the project, an opportunity to provide an overview of the main outcomes of the project that will be very valuable to the work going forward of the Arctic Council Working Groups and their expert groups. This deliverable serves to provide an overview of the main near-final results of the project as a whole, with an emphasis on Work Packages and Arctic Services of particular relevance to individual Arctic Council Working Groups, as well as the key outcomes of the project.