Dissemination - Arctic Climate Change,
Economy and Society

In a project such as ACCESS, it is extremely important to establish an effective and efficient dissemination of the project results and conclusions together with an exploitation of the developed knowledge, in order to reach all the concerned stakeholders in a two-ways information exchange. The dissemination and exploitation plan will ensure that relevant information is available and delivered to the appropriate stakeholders in a suitable and easily accessible format. This will help the stakeholders to make decisions, set priorities and choose strategies from an informed position. The dissemination plan will be reviewed regularly and draw together the outcomes from all WPs and stakeholders meetings.

 

 

The dissemination and exploitation plan will focus on the following two different issues:

• Dissemination and public outreach: project results and other issues to be disseminated will be available. The project website will be an essential aspect of this activity: by simplifying technical language and placing the science in a wider context; it will allow wider public dissemination and thus reach an effective communication of scientific outputs to non-expert stakeholders and large public. The website will also be the platform for project participants to share data and results, inside the consortium.
• Exploitation of knowledge: data management will be the principal object of this activity, that will gather all the existent data in the different project domains in order to make them available for the concerned actors via databases, data portals, etc.

 

Target groups

The consortium identified 4 target groups for dissemination/exploitation of the project results:

• Industrial stakeholders: strategies and recommendations for the sustainable management of the marine environment and marine key resources in the arctic region must be fully explained to stakeholders to maximize understanding and the likelihood of implementation. This is fundamental to the success of the European Arctic Policy, the EU Marine Strategy, the future European Maritime Policy and associated policies;
• Academic stakeholders: international academic community and research actors can also be interested in the ACCESS results and will be associated to the project in order to establish a large, well structured network of exploitation/communication;
• Policy makers: since the ACCESS activity is closely associated with the objectives of the international climate change and sustainable development priorities, a close dialogue to inform these parties of the ACCESS results relevant to their policies and discussions will be maintained. Many outputs of ACCESS will be directly relevant to policy makers both within the EU, within individual Arctic States and within international fora (e.g. Arctic Council, IMO, etc.);
• Society (large public & education): much of the output will also be of direct relevance to general society, this is why large public and education (manly university students via summer schools and dedicated courses)universities will be approached with the appropriated tools.

Some of those actors have already been identified and are part of the Stakeholders/End Users Forum but the actors’ list will be finalized within the first year of the project.

 

Specific objectives:

 

To demonstrate the innovative side of the project and increase the
public, policy-maker and industry awareness of the ACCESS project results, the project partners will disseminate project results through: dedicated sections of the ACCESS website; videos; printed materials, including publications and dedicated briefs to the attention of policy makers; workshops, conferences and other meetings; training sessions; and other effective means.

 

The ACCESS official websiteThe Project website (coordinated by UPMC) will serve as a central point for gathering, redistributing, disseminating and enhancing project-related information. By doing so, the website will facilitate synergies to share information appropriately from the project partners in a meaningful manner for others to use. As mentioned earlier, all the information made available on the ACCESS website will be screened by the steering committee. The website will be structured into sections providing detailed information on the different activities in the various sectors of ACCESS.
Some examples are given below:

• The ACCESS website will be composed of two sections. One will be accessible by the public at large and the other one will be protected and only accessible to the ACCESS partners. Dedicated sections will give access to specific topics as well as crosscutting issues, taking into consideration the target groups.
• The official electronic ‘ACCESS Newsletter’ starting M6 - will be produced quarterly and disseminated electronically via the website after being approved by the steering committee (UPMC). The electronic ‘ACCESS Newsletter’ also will be sent to individuals and institutions, which are compiled in a growing list throughout the project. Every year, after each annual General Assembly, a composite printed ‘ACCESS Overview’ will be produced as a synthesis of ACCESS results and activities from the previous year. The printed ‘ACCESS Overview’ will be broadly disseminated as well as archived in electronic form for future retrieval.
• Dedicated Policy Briefs.
• Activities in new media e.g. set up an ACCESS blog and twitter account.
• Regularly updated video download from the site will be made available (short video from various field works and special ACCESS events). The videos will include hyperlinks to publicly broadcast interviews with project partners, which will be compiled and uploaded on a regular basis. The public video broadcasts will be supplemented with public audio broadcasts with the project partners. Moreover, ACCESS will work in close cooperation with the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge (ACCESS partners) to enhance general outreach and communication on ACCESS crosscutting issues, building on existing information-exchange networks such as the polar libraries colloquy. The information exchange and dissemination strategy will be developed in collaboration with the Arctic Center and Scott Polar Research Institute in an inclusive manner to facilitate outreach activities that will best reach the target groups. A section of the website will be related to indigenous, with photos and videos.
• An ACCESS related website at the Arctic Center focussing on indigenous people’s aspects. (UoL)ACCESS will also develop a close cooperation with the EU-Arctic Forum. This will allow the ACCESS consortium to disseminate, inform and discuss ACCESS results to and with EU policy makers.

 

Production of ACCESS movies and videos

• Realisation of short videos illustrating the field work progress. These videos will be available on the website after each new field work has been completed.
• Movies on field work related to indigenous peoples.
• Realisation of a long movie on the main ACCESS activities and results. This movie will aim at the general public and will be used as an educational tool.
• Videos from public media broadcasts with project partners also will be utilized.

 

Production and distribution of printed material.

The production and distribution of printed material on ACCESS project will be an ongoing process.

Examples are given:

• Official ‘ACCESS Flyer’– Two flyers will be printed: one targeting researchers and policy makers and another one aimed at a broader public.
• Composite ‘ACCESS Overview’ will be printed for broad dissemination and then archived on the website at the end of each year. All the information available in the electronic ACCESS newsletter will be made available for ACCESS partners institutional sites, as for example:
• NOC monthly newsletter ACCESS special edition (NERC)
• Stockholm Resilience Centre and albaeco, annual report
• BEIJER annual report in September every year
• Contribution of articles to emerging pan-European media e.g., http://www.voxeu.org/(ESRI)

  

Dissemination to scholars, training

Specific courses (Masters and PhD courses) will be specifically organized within the framework of ACCESS, on topics related to governance and UNCLOS, economics of the environment, ecology for economists, Arctic Ocean geopolitics,…   

 

Organisation of workshops and summer schools on ACCESS topics opened to researchers and stakeholders.

• 1st summer school on cross-sectoral ACCESS topics in BREMEN
• International workshop on marine mammals of the Arctic, including all aspects of conservation in BARCELONA
• 2nd summer school dedicated to cross-sectoral ACCESS activities in STOCKHOLM
• Stakeholders’ workshop. “Sharing the Sea: Coexistence and Challenges of Coastal Economies”.

Press releases

• Organisation of press conferences once a year, during each General assembly organised by local hosts.
• The ACCESS cross-sectoral approach dealing with 'Changing climate conditions in the Arctic and changed human activities' will be a key topic for the dissemination work of the AWI press office over the entire duration of ACCESS (AWI)

Organization of conference sessions targeting stakeholders and scientists

Specific ACCESS sessions will be opened to ACCESS’s partners, researchers and stakeholders in various conferences attended by the ACCESS partners.

 

Exploitation of knowledge

To support communication within the project as well as to inform external users of the data sets generated by the project a data management system will be set up. This will ensure that data generated by the project is well documented and online available (unless specifically restricted) both for internal and external users within the project period and taken care of after the project end. The availability to the external users will have to be approved by the steering committee necessarily. Two parallel, but wholly integrated data management locations are proposed – one by met.no for all climate related data and one by NERC, for all other data and records. UCAM will assist with coordinating best practices from the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), the Polar Information Commons(PIC), and related information management and discovery activities.