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.

In the last decade a significant number of projects and programmes in different domains of environmental monitoring and Earth observation have generated a substantial amount of data and knowledge on different aspects related to environmental quality and sustainability. Big data generated by in-situ or satellite platforms are being collected and archived with a plethora of systems and instruments making difficult the sharing of data and knowledge to stakeholders and policy makers for supporting key economic and societal sectors. The overarching goal of ERA-PLANET is to strengthen the European Research Area in the domain of Earth Observation in coherence with the European participation to Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and the Copernicus. The expected impact is to strengthen the European leadership within the forthcoming GEO 2015-2025 Work Plan. ERA-PLANET will reinforce the interface with user communities, whose needs the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) intends to address. It will provide more accurate, comprehensive and authoritative information to policy and decision-makers in key societal benefit areas, such as Smart cities and Resilient societies; Resource efficiency and Environmental management; Global changes and Environmental treaties; Polar areas and Natural resources. ERA-PLANET will provide advanced decision support tools and technologies aimed to better monitor our global environment and share the information and knowledge in different domain of Earth Observation.