INPA at Arctic PASSION General Assembly
The Arctic PASSION project held its annual General Assembly from 11th to 13th June 2024 at the Sámi Cultural Centre Sajos in Inari, Finland. Organised by the Alfred Wegener Institute in collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the UKRI British Antarctic Survey, GRID-Arendal, and Snowchange, around 80 participants travelled to Inari from Canada, the US, Greenland, and Europe.
The 80 meeting delegates in front of the Sámi Cultural Centre Sajos, in Inari.
INPA is leading a task in work package 1 on improving terrestrial monitoring at ten Arctic stations. During the meeting, we had the chance to present the progress being made in the project and to discuss the next steps of synthesising data and making it accessible, and how it can feed into a comprehensive Arctic observing system.
Lots of progress has been made in all work packages, and it was a joy to hear about all the recent updates. A highlight was the launch of the Arctic Knowledge Hub, which includes transcribed oral histories of climate and ecological changes from Indigenous peoples across the Arctic. It was co-created by Snowchange and six Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ Communities: the Skolt Sámi, Western Greenlandic Inuit, The Gwich’in, the Faroese, and former partners from Russia. The Indigenous knowledge dates as far back as 8,000 years and has been compiled over the past three years. They are effectively summarised in storymaps by Snowchange and are accessible for map viewing at www.arcticseas.org.
Our INPA team at Arctic PASSION. Caroline Coch (left) is leading task 1.3c Establishing terrestrial monitoring sites for INPA in the Arctic PASSION project. Margareta Johansson (right) is Chair of the INPA Board.
Participating in projects like Arctic PASSION are one of the benefits for stations that are members of INPA. To find out more about how to become a member of INPA click here.
The next and final General Assembly will take place in Potsdam (Germany) in September 2025, before the project comes to an end in December 2025.
