Sea Alarm at the Twitter Conference: Challenges of the Arctic oil spill response (#APP4SEA2020)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, conferences everywhere are being cancelled, however, the Arctic Preparedness Platform for Oil Spill and Other Environmental Accidents (APP4SEA) elected to hold a Twitter conference, at which Sea Alarm was an invited participant.

The APP4SEA is a Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme (NPA) and EU funded project, that aims to improve spill response preparedness in the Northern and Arctic areas of Europe, the NPA Region. The conference, held on 16 April 2020, highlighted results of the 3-year project and myriad other relevant topics and challenges found when responding to an oil spill in the Arctic.

Sea Alarm presented a thread of 10 tweets under the title ‘Sea Alarm and Arctic Oiled Wildlife response: Strategies and Challenges’. It outlined Sea Alarm’s activities and some of the response and preparedness work done on a European and global level. Sea Alarm also presented its perspective on wildlife response under Arctic conditions, including the challenges involved in responding in that type of environment with its unique biodiversity and sensitivity, its remoteness and its extreme weather conditions. The tweets further talked about the use and limitations of response options such as rehabilitation, euthanasia and monitoring impacts, and the need to invest in preparedness, integrated planning, equipment stockpiles and trained strike teams.

Twitter conferences are a relatively new tool allowing people to come together to exchange ideas and information in a low-carbon and low-cost format. This was the first time that Sea Alarm has taken part in such an event, and we are grateful to the APP4SEA conference organisers to have given us the opportunity and for assisting us with the delivery of our contribution. The conference can be viewed under the link #APP4SEA2020, or via this link.