Community Consultation Meetings in Longyearbyen, Svalbard

Permafrost Project Information meeting (Tuesday, 27th August)

This meeting was all about understanding what is already going on within permafrost research in Svalbard and learning what is planned in the three new EU projects, ILLUQ, ArcSolution, and ICEBERG. In total, eleven projects presented their research online and in-person.

Following a rich discussion, ILLUQ, ArcSolution, and ICEBERG presented an overview of their individual objectives emphasizing the fieldwork activities in Svalbard starting now. Synergies between all three projects were discussed, the primary ones being the One Health approach, meaningful community engagement and pollution reduction strategies.

Stakeholder consultation meeting (Wednesday afternoon, 28th August)

The purpose of this meeting was to introduce local officials, educators and organisations to the three sister projects – ILLUQ, ArcSolution and ICEBERG. As all three projects have fieldwork planned in Svalbard, the goal was to actively engage local stakeholders to help align research interests with local concerns and needs.

In order to spur discussion several questions using LearnLab were used. These included:

• What are their concerns related to pollution, health and permafrost?
• What are specific pollutants of concern?
• How can the projects best address these concerns?
• All projects plan to have spin-off activities involving the participation of locals in monitoring and data collection, do you have any ideas or suggestions for this?
• How would you like to receive information from the projects/how should we communicate back our results?

The last question stimulated the most discussion highlighting that locals are very interested in the research results, but the presentation and wording need to be publicly available and concise.

Public meeting (Wednesday evening, 28th August)

A consultation meeting open to the public took place Wednesday evening in UNIS’s large auditorium – Møysalen. Approximately 25 people came to listen to short presentations by the three projects that addressed the activities planned in Svalbard as well as why and how the projects are relevant for the local communities. Questions using LearnLab again were used to get feedback from participants and spur discussion.

There was so much feedback, however, that only two questions were asked. The first was ‘What are your concerns related to pollution, health and/or permafrost?’ Answers were quite varied ranging from human health concerns due to plastics and contaminants to reindeer getting entangled in old discarded fishing nets and dying of starvation.

The second question was ‘What can the research projects do for you (such as involvement, data, results, etc.)’ Again the need for transparency and simple research communication were emphasised mirroring the discussion during the afternoon session.

The meeting concluded with the three projects agreeing to discuss continued collaboration particularly around community engagement.

Stay tuned for more information

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