Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) 30th Working Group meeting was held between November 28 and December 1 in Helsinki, Finland. Eight Arctic States (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and US), three of six AC permanent participants (indigenous peoples’ organizations), six AC observer countries (China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Rep. Korea), and related organizations such as PAME, CAFF, EPPR, IASC, and WWF, participated in this meeting.
The main purposes of this meeting are 1) approvals of assessment reports for the AC Ministerial meeting, especially for the version of “Summary for Policy Makers (SPM)” and 2) discussions and agreement of AMAP work plan for the period 2017-2019. In general, the AMAP assessment reports are compiled as both technical report and SPM, based on lots of inputs from leading and contributing authors (scientists). The leading authors group of each report play an important role to summarize technical report into SPM in collaboration with science writers. Lots of discussions for SPMs were done among the participants in this meeting and we recognized there were still lots of action items before their approvals. Also, AMAP secretariat explained the draft of AMAP Workplan for 2017-2019 and all of the participants, including AC observer countries and AMAP related organizations, had general comments on the work plan. However, we do not have enough time to discuss the work plan in this meeting. Therefore, the chair and AMAP secretariat decided that AMAP HoDs meeting would be held around the end of January, 2017, to approve the assessment reports and agree the work plan.
In Item 12 of this meeting, “Information from Observers”, I reported Japan’s AMAP related activities which included a brief report of “GRENE Arctic Climate Change Research Project” (2011-2016) and an introduction of “Arctic Challenge for Sustainability (ArCS)” project (2015-2020) as well as Japan’s continuous contribution to AMAP activities such as SWIPA, AACA-C, AOA and so on. The AMAP chair, secretariat, and participants (Arctic States) expressed thanks to Japan’s contribution to AMAP activities.
Note that AMAP 25th anniversary seminar was held in the afternoon of the 2nd day of the WG meeting with lots of participants who have contributed and have been contributing AMAP activities.
Next AMAP WG meeting will be held in Reykjavik in autumn 2017, which will be hosted by Iceland.
Takashi Kikuchi (JAMSTEC / theme 4 PI)
The 30th meeting of AMAP WG
