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.

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.

INTERACT aims for a geographically comprehensive and excellent state-of-the-art terrestrial research infrastructure throughout the Arctic and adjoining forest and alpine regions to identify environmental change, to facilitate understanding and prediction of future change and to inform decision makers about societally-relevant impacts. INTERACT is the fundamental building block and one-stop-shop for EU and international projects, programmes and organisations requiring access to northern lands, data and services, and includes a rapid response capability to potential hazards. INTERACT is pan-Arctic, multidisciplinary and crosses EU call domains by linking to forest, coastal, marine and atmospheric communities. INTERACT uniquely unites 77 research stations in a Station Managers’ Forum ensuring inter-comparability of information and excellent science support. A Data Forum improves availability of data by bringing data providers together with data users. Physical (7780 days) pan-Arctic Trans-national Access is offered by 43 stations and virtual access is offered by 29. An innovative TA User Community will stimulate new collaborations and improved information flow while new state-of-the-art educational resources will encourage young scientists. Joint research activities will ensure close cooperation between the Arctic Council’s biodiversity monitoring programme and station activities; develop new technology in a WP led by Industry to enlarge the research stations’ environmental observing footprints; and produce guidance for local communities to adapt to change. INTERACT’s incalculable legacy and societal impact includes aiding people to adapt to local and global environmental changes, recruiting the next generation of environmental scientists, offering access and opportunities to researchers world-wide and providing data and information to high level regional and global organisations and decision-makers.