The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 39

Following their review of the climate chapter contained in the 1998 AAR, Arctic
Council ministers requested AMAP, together with CAFF and the IASC, to complete an
ArcticClimate ImpactAssessment(ACIA).Thiswasamassiveundertaking.Theplainlan-
guage overview “Impacts of a Warming Arctic” was presented at the Fourth Arctic Coun-
cil Ministerial Conference (Reykjavik, Iceland) in 2004 and the full 1,030-page scientific
ACIA report followed a year later. It proved to be a much-cited document. It firmly es-
tablished functional linkages between AMAP and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and brought the Arctic dimension of climate change to the attention of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). All these reports
(except the ACIA overview) were written and peer-reviewed following the basic format set
up for the 1998 AAR.
The AMAP assessments of 1997-1998 and 2002-2004 were very successful.
However, this model had a voracious appetite for human and financial resources that could
not be sustained. It was also slow and lacked sufficient flexibility to quickly refocus ef-
fort towards new and changing priorities. In 2005, I was asked to suggest a new business
strategy for AMAP. The new strategy is founded on the decision to produce three types of
assessment output:

1. Outputs prepared at the request of the Arctic Council or for international organ-
isations with whom specific cooperative activities have been identified by
Arctic Council ministers as being crucial for protecting the Arctic environ-
ment. Examples include:

· Comprehensive circumpolar AMAP Assessment Reports , such as those

of 1997-1998 and 2002-2004 but now produced at roughly 10-year
intervals or as required. The circumpolar assessments are produced in
the same way as the 1997-1998 plain language SOAER and the sci-
entific AAR - except that as with the 2002-2004 assessments, each
issue or report is now produced individually. Frequently, the scientific
AAR would form the basis of a series of linked papers published in a