ICEBERG: An Arctic Engine Driving broader Mission-Led Ocean Restoration

ICEBERG delivers integrated, community-led evidence

Across the European Arctic, communities are living on the frontline of climate change and pollution. From microplastics and legacy contaminants to emissions from growing ship traffic, these pressures cut across ecosystems, human health and local economies, demanding responses that are both science-based and community-led. At the same time, the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030” is mobilising actors across the Atlantic and Arctic to restore ecosystems, boost resilience and build a fair, sustainable blue economy.

Horizon Europe’s ICEBERG project (“Innovative Community Engagement for Building Effective Resilience and Arctic Ocean Pollution-Control Governance in the Context of Climate Change”) is designed precisely for this Arctic frontline. ICEBERG assesses sources, types, distribution and impacts of pollution together with chronic climate-induced stressors in the European Arctic’s land–ocean continuum, using a One Health approach that explicitly links ecosystem, animal and human health.

BlueMissionAA, a Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action, plays a very different but complementary role: it is the coordination hub for implementing the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030” in the Atlantic and Arctic basins. As part of the Atlantic & Arctic Lighthouse, BlueMissionAA structures and mobilises a broad community of stakeholders, develops governance guidelines aligned with EU and national policies, builds a monitoring platform to track Mission progress, and creates an innovation ecosystem to upscale restoration solutions while engaging citizens. Coordinated by the AIR Centre with partners spanning research organisations, regional networks and innovation actors, the project is tasked with connecting on-the-ground initiatives to Mission-level objectives and investments.

From ICEBERG to BlueMission: scaling insights across the Atlantic Arctic

The bridge between ICEBERG and BlueMissionAA is both conceptual and operational. Conceptually, ICEBERG generates exactly the type of integrated evidence, risk assessment and governance innovation that the Mission needs to underpin restoration and resilience in the Arctic and its connected Atlantic domains. Operationally, the AIR Centre’s dual role—contributing to ICEBERG on risk assessment, marine litter mapping and local resilience strategies, while coordinating BlueMissionAA—creates a direct pathway for knowledge, tools and policy recommendations to flow from a single project into the wider Atlantic–Arctic Lighthouse community. In ICEBERG, for instance, automated marine litter density mapping and co-developed resilience strategies are explicitly framed as contributions to more effective marine restoration tools and Mission-aligned governance in the Arctic–Atlantic basin, with policy outputs channelled via BlueMissionAA.

This linkage has several practical implications for Mission implementation. First, it ensures that Mission actions in the Atlantic & Arctic Lighthouse are informed by detailed, context-specific understanding of pollution pathways and climate interactions in sensitive Arctic regions, rather than by generic assumptions. Second, it demonstrates a working model of vertical integration: community-level engagement and Indigenous perspectives feed into EU-level strategies through a structured hub, helping to make Mission governance more inclusive and legitimate. Third, by embedding ICEBERG’s results in the BlueMissionAA innovation ecosystem and monitoring framework, there is a clear route for upscaling successful tools and approaches—such as pollution-control governance models or citizen-engagement methods—across other Arctic and Atlantic coastal communities.

In that sense, ICEBERG can be seen as one of the Arctic “engines” of the broader Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters. It pilots integrated One Health assessments, tests new forms of community engagement and delivers actionable recommendations for pollution-control governance, while BlueMissionAA provides the architecture to circulate, amplify and mainstream those lessons across the Atlantic–Arctic Lighthouse. Together, they show how Horizon Europe can connect a single project’s detailed work with communities in Svalbard, Greenland or Iceland to a basin-scale, mission-driven effort to restore ocean and coastal health by 2030.

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