Kick-off event for HORIZON Research and Innovation Project

At the end of January, the kick-off meeting for the HORIZON Research and Innovation Project ICEBERG: Innovative Community Engagement for Building Effective Resilience and Arctic Ocean Pollution-Control Governance in the Context of Climate Change will be held at Oulu University in Finnland. Project lead Thora Herrmann (Oulu University) and project coordinator Élise Lépy (Oulu University) will welcome the 16 partners from all across Europe, the RIFS research group Arctic Governance being one of them, for a two-day meeting to set the stage for the coming three years.

The ICEBERG project has a two-fold aim: to comprehensively assess sources, types, distributions, and impacts of pollution in combination with chronic climate-induced stressors on ecosystems and communities in the European Arctic's land-ocean continuum using a One Health approach, and to develop strategies for enhancing community-led resilience, as well as pollution-control governance. To this end, the project focusses on three (sub)regional case studies: western Svalbard, southern Greenland, and northern Iceland.

The Arctic Governance research group will focus on ethics and evaluation as part of the overall project, and take part in developing an overarching framework - guidelines, standards, recommendations, and protocols - that ensures that the research developed in the project adheres to the principles of co-creation, research ethics, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Specifically, the research group, will work on the establishment of an ethics evaluation framework, recommendations for the refining of research questions and methods, how to implement continuous evaluation and feedback as part of the research process, and reflect on adopted evaluation procedures and methodologies with the communities in question.