ALBERT

Description: During the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007- 2008 education and outreach became more and more important and many different initiatives were started to foster this aim. It got obvious that without a meaningful communication of scientific results to the broader public, including all ages, the very important research outcomes will not be understood and accepted by the public. As this is a key in order to convince stakeholders, decision makers, politicians, but also just normal individuals, that these outcomes are of high importance for everybody’s daily life it and there is a high need to be active and react, it must be the goal of every scientist to make its research as understandable as possible. Maybe even more important is this content is to raise the awareness of the next generation for sensitive issues such as global change, climate warming and the impacts of the different regions of the world. Inspired by the activities of the IPY also the permafrost community started to foster their education and outreach projects. As they recognized its importance the International Permafrost Association (IPA) even launched and Education and Outreach committee in 2010 and started the collaboration with many educational institutions such as the University of the Arctic or APECS. Financially supported by the IPA this committee started its work during the last years and already could achieve some substantial outcomes. For the upcoming International Conference on Permafrost in 2016 (ICOP 2016), that will be held in Potsdam, Germany, it is intended that education and outreach will play an even more important role. For this a special education and outreach conference team was created, that will be responsible for the activities during the conference. They are planning to involve international schools and teachers to the conference activities, which will be a very new and innovative initiative. This presentation will present the proposed actions during, but also before and after, the conference. This could include a video competition for international schools to attend the event, the involvement of one or two local schools and a workshop for international teachers. A special event could be an evening lecture held by a scientist that will be open for the public. It will be a semi-entertaining, semi-scientific presentation that will be easy understandable for non-scientists. One main goal of the planned education and outreach activities will also be the possibility for children and the public to get in touch with ‘real’ scientists, communicate with them and in that way somehow close the gap between science and the daily live. All activities and events will be organized by the education and outreach conference team but mainly supported by the IPA Education and Outreach committee as well as the German ‘coole Klassen’ (cool classes) project, an initiative of the working group ‘Polar Teachers’ of the German Association of Polar Research (DGP).