2007 - International Polar Year

Say goodbye to the International Year of Deserts and Desertification. That was soooo 2006! Now you can welcome the UN World Meteorological Organization's International Polar Year, 2007. It's the first "polar year" since the 1950's and, this year, there is no shortage of research deemed urgent.

So far about $500-million has been dedicated to Arctic and Antarctic research projects. Canada is the biggest contributor with some $150-million in funding. Canada is followed by the Scandinavian countries and then the US which has committed to $60-million in contributions. According to the APF news service, the research will be highly focussed:

"Close to 60 per cent of what is known about the polar regions, particularly the Arctic, comes from research carried out in 1958," said Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network on the Arctic.

"The difference today is that the new polar year will occur in the context of global warming," Fortier told AFP.

Scientists studying the Arctic in the past limited their work to biological, geographical and physical sciences, but they will now examine the impact of climate change on humans.

"The other difference between this year and the previous polar years is the very explicit inclusion of what we call the human dimension," said David Hik, an Arctic expert at the University of Alberta.

"The previous polar years were an effort to understand the physical sciences and to a less extent the biological sciences, but this polar year embraces all science disciplines," Hik said.

"And particularly in the Arctic, it is really difficult to do science the way we did 50 years ago. The science has to be relevant to people who live in the North, and the reason to include them in the scientific research is to make sure they share the benefits of investment in the polar year," Hik said."