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International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

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Fig. 2.10-7.<br />

Participants of the<br />

‘Nordic IPY Seminar’<br />

boarding the ship in<br />

Ilulissat, Greenland,<br />

April 2005<br />

(Photo: Birger Poppel).<br />

324<br />

IPY 20 07–20 08<br />

during IPY enabled local communities to benefit<br />

from science projects in their home areas (Paci et al.,<br />

2008) and ensured that the implemented IPY projects<br />

were relevant to the communities and local policy<br />

development. That will certainly facilitate bridging<br />

research driven by academic institutions, agencies,<br />

and indigenous communities and organizations in the<br />

years ahead.<br />

Several other footprints of the social science and<br />

humanities participation in IPY expand beyond the<br />

disciplinary field. Social scientists were the first to argue<br />

for the need for established ‘ethical guidelines’ in<br />

conducting IPY research and lobbied successfully for<br />

its approval by the Joint Committee in 2007 (www.ipy.<br />

org/ipy-blogs/item/796 - Appendix 8). 10 They initiated<br />

the collection of narratives, documents and memoirs<br />

related to the origination and early planning for IPY<br />

<strong>2007–2008</strong> (Chapter 1.2), and produced the first historical<br />

overviews of IPY <strong>2007–2008</strong> and compared it to<br />

the earlier IPY/IGY programs (Barr and Lüdecke, 2010;<br />

Elzinga, 2009; Korsmo, 2007, 2009; Launius et al., 2010).<br />

They argued for the preservation of IPY-related documentation<br />

and memorabilia that eventually helped<br />

establish the IPY archives at the Scott <strong>Polar</strong> Research<br />

Institute in Cambridge, U.K. (Chapter 4.4).<br />

Social Science and Humanities<br />

Contributions to the IPY Science<br />

Themes<br />

Snapshot (status). The fundamental goal of IPY 2007–<br />

2008 was to determine the baseline status of contemporary<br />

natural and human environments and<br />

processes in the polar regions (Theme 1 – Rapley et<br />

al., 2004). Almost every major IPY project in the social<br />

science and humanities field assessed the contemporary<br />

status of polar societies and social processes,<br />

and generated ‘baseline’ data on community development<br />

(nos. 157, 183, 462), industrial exploitation of<br />

polar resources (nos. 10, 46, 227, 310), status of indig-

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