The general objective of WP1 is to analyse how to address cross-disciplinary Global challenges in environmental sciences by joining the data and know-how resources of international Research Infrastructures in collaboration. This objective requires also exploring the complementarities of top-down and bottom-up approaches, and understanding how to combine geographical and temporal scales.

This general goal can be broken down into the following specific objectives:

  1. Identify and describe a set of relevant environmental global challenges that could be addressed by RIs of Arctic research (including the carbon cycle and GHG fluxes of Arctic regions), marine science and biodiversity, combining thematic topics, geographical scales and top-down/bottom-up approaches.
  2. Develop in detail a feasibility analysis for a global challenge selected from the previous set to understand the requirements posed on the collaboration of different international RIs. As an example, the analysis of the global carbon cycle monitoring and modelling at different spatial scales would help to identify both synergies and gaps among the different partners in order to create a comprehensive view of the global carbon cycle on Earth.
  3. Analyse the way to improve the connections between the knowledge created by the participants’ RIs and the tools dedicated to quantify ecosystem services at different spatial and temporal scales. It will help to create crosswalks among RIs aiming to improve the understanding of the Earth System and tools (software, institutions) aiming to quantify the provision of ecosystem services by the System.