12th Edition of Arctic Futures Symposium a Successful Hybrid Event!

This year symposium's successful hybrid format allowed many people from around the world to engage in interesting discussions both online and in-person.

The 2021 Arctic Futures Symposium finished just a few days ago. In spite of the challenging COVID situation, this year's Arctic Futures Symposium went ahead as planned as a hybrid event. This format allowed us to meet many of the "usual suspects" from the Arctic stakeholders and many new faces  in-person in Brussels again, this time at the Martin's Brussels EU Hotel. Those unable to travel to actively participate in the symposium online could conenct via Zoom. Despite this challenging situation, the event went very well and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback.

The International Polar Foundation would like to thank all of the moderators and speakers for generously giving their time to take part in the symposium and to the partners for their help in helping us put together the interesting and diverse panels on topics relevant to Arctic stakeholders. Special thanks goes to our on-site preparation team for ensuring that the event ran smoothly.

On Monday 6 December we had a chance to listen to three panel discussions on Arctic Governance led by Arne Holm (Editor-in-Chief of High North News), Romain Chuffart (Fellow at The Arctic Institute), and Marie-Anne Coninsx (Former EU Ambassador at Large for the Arctic).

The second day of the symposium addressed Arctic youth, demographics and capacity-Building, Arctic resilience, and the Arctic as a more sustainable place to do business. The moderators of these panels - Sveinung Eikeland (Vice Rector of UiT i the Arctic University of Norway) Mike Sfraga (Chair of U.S. Arctic Research Commission and Director of the Wilson Center Polar Institute), and Mads Qvist Frederiksen (Director of the Arctic Economic Council)  led diverse panels with speakes who discussed the challenges and opportunities they face in their everyday lives.

All these contributions made this year's symposium so special. Videos of each of the panels and a summary of the main points discussed during the symposium will be soon posted on the IPF YouTube Channel  for those of you who missed the event.

In the meantime, mark your calendars for the 3rd Arctic Shorts film evening, which will take place on Wednesday 26 January at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels city centre (sanitary conditiosn permitting). We will post more details about how to sign up for this on the Arctic Futures website in the coming weeks.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us at events@polarfoundation.org .