Planet Earth faces unprecedented environmental changes that will affect all members of society. Arctic climate warming is more than twice the global rate and unpredictable extreme events cause major impacts on ecosystems and people. However, the Arctic atmospheric circulation causes extreme events and societal damage beyond the Arctic which need international research and monitoring to understand and predict. Furthermore, attitudes need to be changed throughout the world through outreach while the next generation needs to be equipped to live in a different world. INTERACT III innovates a pan-arctic network of 86 research stations in 16 northern countries to provide a fully integrated, advanced infrastructure now able to meaningfully address major societal challenges and provide services for 155 global and regional networks. Furthermore, the global reputation of INTERACT has attracted world-leading partners and enterprises to participate in reducing the impacts of hazardous change while maximizing the opportunities arising from new technologies. Specifically, INTERACT III provides comprehensive coordination of 64 partners and 86 research stations. The station managers design best practices to ensure excellent research, monitoring, education and outreach. INTERACT III builds on an extremely successful transnational access program that has already populated the Arctic with 900 researchers to further provide excellent science while reducing the environmental footprints of researchers through improving remote and virtual access. The access transnationality ensures new collaborations, innovative science and science diplomacy at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. Station managers, transnational access and joint research activities cooperate to address major societal challenges in a fully integrated infrastructure while their data and understanding are made globally available through exceptional outreach and education and policy briefings to decision makers.

With communities and ecosystems subject to multiple environmental, climatic, cultural and economic stresses, the Polar Regions truly represent the sentinel of climate change. Already now, changes in the Polar Regions are changing the lives of polar residents, and are affecting the well-being of many polar communities. Furthermore, the state of the Polar systems has far reaching effects on atmosphere, ocean and land including the change of weather pattern in Europe. Polar issues have been therefore rising up the political agenda across Europe over the past decade and the European Union and its executive body, the EC, attribute an increasing importance to science and innovation in the high latitudes and are major investors in Polar research. There is therefore an increasing need to further develop the coordination of Polar research actions in Europe to give evidence-based advice to decision makers. This must include a continued involvement of all relevant stake- and right holders to develop transdisciplinary and transnational projects to tackle societally relevant problems connected to the Polar Regions. EU-PolarNet 2 will provide a coordination platform to co-develop strategies to advance the European Polar Research action and its contribution to the policy-making processes. It will operate as such a platform for the 4-years of the project´s lifetime. Once EU-PolarNet 2 ends, the gained experience, the established network and the developed tools to facilitate better coordination and co-design of Polar research actions will be transferred to the European Polar Coordination Office to be sustained. The EU-PolarNet 2 consortium consist of 25 partners representing all European and associated countries with Polar research programmes and activities. This allows EU-PolarNet 2 to significantly improve the coordination and co-design of European Polar research actions but also to provide evidence-based advice on behalf of the whole European Polar community.

The Southern Ocean regulates the global climate by controlling heat and carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean. It is responsible for about 60-90% of the excess heat (i.e. associated with anthropogenic climate change) absorbed by the World Oceans each year, and is also recognised to largely control decadal scale variability of Earth carbon budget, with key implications for decision makers and regular global stocktake agreed as part of the Paris agreement. Despite such pivotal climate importance, its representation in global climate model represents one of the main weaknesses of climate simulation and projection because too little is known about the underlying processes. Limitations come both from the lack of observations in this extreme environment and its inherent sensitivity to intermittent small-scale processes that are not captured in current Earth system models. The overall objective of SO-CHIC is to understand and quantify variability of heat and carbon budgets in the Southern Ocean through an investigation of the key processes controlling exchanges between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice using a combination of observational and modelling approaches. SO-CHIC considers the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean as a natural laboratory both because of its worldwide importance in water-mass formation and because of the strong European presence in this sector already established at national levels, which allow to best leverage existing expertise, infrastructure, and observation network, around one single coordinated overall objective. SO-CHIC also takes the opportunity of the recent re-appearance of the Atlantic Sector Weddell Polynya to unveil its dynamics and global impact on heat and carbon cycles. A combination of dedicated observation, existing decades-long time-series, and state-of-the-art modelling will be used to address specific objectives on key processes, as well as their impact and feedback on the large-scale atmosphere-ocean system.

The polar regions play a key role in the Earth’s system. They are essential for our climate and are sentinels of climate change, human expansion, and the hunt of new resources. The polar regions are losing ice, and their oceans and land are changing rapidly. The consequences of this polar transition extend to the whole planet and are affecting people in multiple ways. Evidence-based policy recommendations are needed, but the polar regions are difficult to reach, and research infrastructures able to operate in these regions are scarce. To understand and predict key processes in the polar regions and provide evidence-based information, the polar research community needs access to world-class research infrastructure operating in these regions. POLARIN is an international network of polar research infrastructures and their services, aiming at addressing the scientific challenges of the polar regions. The network includes a wide array of complementary and interdisciplinary top level research infrastructures: Arctic and Antarctic research stations, research vessels and icebreakers operating at both poles, observatories, data infrastructures and ice and sediment core repositories. POLARIN will provide integrated, challenge-driven, and combined access to these infrastructures to facilitate interdisciplinary research on complex processes. POLARIN will: 1. Provide challenge-driven transnational access to a large portfolio of research infrastructures. 2. Improve the access to data by improving data availability and interoperability between data infrastructures. 3. Provide virtual access to data and data services. 4. Provide data products for the scientific community and decision makers. 5. Train the young generation of polar researchers in optimally exploiting the infrastructures for their research. 6. Duly advertise the services offered by POLARIN and engage the infrastructure users to share their research outcomes with society.

OCEAN:ICE will assess the impacts of key Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean processes on Planet Earth, via their influence on sea level rise, deep water formation, ocean circulation and climate. An innovative and ambitious combination of observations and numerical models, including coupled ice sheet-climate model development, will be used to improve predictions of how changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets impact global climate. It will make new circumpolar and Atlantic observations in observational gaps. It will assimilate these and existing data into improved ice sheet boundary conditions and forcing, producing new estimates of ice sheet melt and impacts on ocean circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation. It will develop, calibrate and assess models used to predict the future evolution of the giant ice sheets. It will reduce the deep uncertainty in the impact of their melt on societally relevant environmental changes on decadal to multi-centennial time scales. OCEAN:ICE will assess the potential for passing ice sheet 'tipping points' and their consequences for ocean circulation and climate. OCEAN:ICE will raise the profile of European research through its extensive network of international collaborators, who provide scientific and logistical support. It will directly contribute to the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance through observations, logistical collaboration and analysis. It will significantly advance the state-of-the-art in coupled ice sheet-climate modelling and directly contribute to international climate assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and World Ocean Assessment. It will link organically to European data centres to disseminate its data, following FAIR and INSPIRE principles. It will deliver improved assessments of European climate impacts from the melting ice sheets, with actionable risk and timescales, to policymakers and the public.