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Digital platforms and the online services that they provide have become an indispensable and ubiquitous part of modern lifestyles, mediating our jobs, hobbies, patterns of consumption and forms of communication. However, no one is steering this development, or closely looking at the impacts that it may have on remote communities in the Arctic and Nordic region, a hotspot for datacenter development.

Both policymakers and the technology industry need to do more to combat the ever-growing demand for data and its associated energy impacts. In this study, based on novel corporate data, expert interviews, focus groups with members of the public, extensive site visits across Greenland, Iceland and Norway and a literature review, we look at the energy and climate impacts of existing and proposed datacenters, both quantitatively and in terms of stakeholder and public perceptions.

In July 2020, the European External Action Service of the European Commission launched a public consultation on the way forward for the European Union’s Arctic policy. The consultation was held to re-examine the role of the EU in Arctic affairs, to revise the priorities of the current Joint Communication on an integrated European Union policy for the Arctic and the actions thereunder, and to identify possible new policy areas to be developed.

This article gives an overview of the recent advances on the interactive modelling of ice sheet dynamics in Earth System Models, and the implications for reducing the uncertainty of sea-level rise projections, especially when considering multi-centennial timescales of changes or low-likelihood high-impact scenarios.

In this article, we provide an overview of current understanding of the land-to-ocean carbon fluxes. We describe the new conceptual model of the land-to-ocean aquatic continuum (proposed by Regnier et al, 2022, Nature), as well as ongoing work to include this new knowledge in Earth System Models.

The latest ZERO IN report from the CONSTRAIN project dives into the science set out in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. It investigates what our climate future could look like by 2050, depending on whether we take action in line with the Paris Agreement, or decide to follow current national policies and plans which still largely lack the action and ambition needed to stop global warming.