COMNAP Symposium 21 (2025)

Assisted by working together in COMNAP, our National Antarctic Program Membership has achieved much in the Antarctic over the past 60+ years and is looking to the future. Implementing their governments’ operations, logistics, science and science support and enabling research in the Antarctic Treaty Area. Such implementation requires individual expertise and qualities - such as tenacity and resolve - and also cooperation on an organisation-to-organisation level. In COMNAP, we share best practice and learn from past experience. We also look to the future.

In 2011, COMNAP convened “The Management Implications of a Changing Antarctica” Workshop. Recognising that the national Antarctic programs were already witnessing changes to the Antarctic, we used the workshop to explore the implications to “future-proof” Antarctic operations. That workshop looked ahead a decade (to 2021) although it did not anticipate the COVID-19 global pandemic.

In 2016, COMNAP initiated, organised, and managed the Antarctic Roadmap Challenges (ARC) project. The ARC project’s goal was to identify the critical requirements to enabling and delivering key science objectives through research in and from Antarctica in, what was then, the next two decades. The ARC project focused on addressing three broad challenges related to technologies, logistics, and infrastructure.

Almost fifteen years since the 2011 workshop and almost a decade since the publication of the ARC Report, how are national Antarctic programs tracking along and tackling the foreseen challenges? What new challenges and opportunities presented themselves along the way? How did national Antarctic programs prepare and respond? How can we take lessons learned and share best practice into the future to ensure we are prepared for it? What will our Antarctic future look like?