The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 34

appointed as executive secretary to the AMAP secretariat in Oslo in 1991. He quickly re-
cruited two outstanding deputy secretaries: Simon Wilson and Vitaly Kimstach. Simon had
worked with the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES) on the North Sea
Task Force and had accumulated extensive knowledge on data quality control, storage and
interpretation.VitalywastheformerdeputyheadoftheRussianFederalServiceforHydro-
meteorology and Environmental Monitoring and carried immense experience, particularly,
of course, on Russian environmental programmes. The seven years during which we built
AMAP were the most rewarding of my working life.
Our first task was to set up the monitoring programme that the AEPS ministers had
made clear should be based on existing national and international programmes. The basic
process that was used to assemble and evaluate the contributing programmes was essen-
tially the same as the process that is now used to maintain it. An idealized AMAP monit-
oring plan was developed, which is periodically adjusted to reflect new knowledge, eval-
uations of environment needs or fresh direction from the AEPS/Arctic Council ministers.
Countries submit their National Implementation Plans (NIPs), which detail their existing
or new activities that can contribute to the overall monitoring plan. This may be supple-
mented by additional contributions from non-Arctic countries and regional and internation-
al organisations. The next step was to establish how they could be harmonized in terms
of such matters as chemical analysis and quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC). This
is absolutely essential because many of the pollutants of greatest concern are measured at
(and may have toxicity at) levels of parts per billion or even parts per trillion. Such har-
monization is not easy, largely because any long-running monitoring programme is likely
to be reluctant to make major changes in methodology due to the fear that analytical results
after the change will not be comparable to those made earlier. This could jeopardize the
possibility of such programmes being able to detect environmental change over time.
One of the practices used to understand these issues is to organise periodic “round
robins”, where a subdivided test sample and/or a certified “standard” is analyzed blindly by
participating laboratories and the results compared by an independent party. When a new
contributing project enters into AMAP, the project organisers often now decide to use an