XXXVI SCAR Delegates’ Meeting 2021 – Three New Scientific Programmes
The XXXVI SCAR Delegates Meeting is currently held online in a series of two-hour sessions over two weeks in March 2021. Bettine van Vuuren is giving the South Africa National Committee members regular feedback. She and Tracy Klarenbeek are South African Respresentatives at the SCAR delegates meeting.
SCAR focuses its science efforts on high priority topical areas through its Scientific Research Programmes (SRPs). Three new programmes were approved by the Executive in 2020 and began officially in January 2021. During the delgeates meeting the following new Scientific Research Programmes have started under the auspices of SCAR. They are:
Integrated Science to Inform Antarctic and Southern Ocean Conservation (Ant-ICON). The Ant-ICON SRP will answer fundamental science questions (as identified by the SCAR Horizon Scan), relating to the conservation and management of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and focus on research to drive and inform international decision-making and policy change.
INStabilities and Thresholds in ANTarctica (INSTANT). The INSTANT SRP will address a first-order question about Antarctica’s contribution to sea level. It encompasses geoscience, physical sciences and biological sciences, of the way in which interactions between the ocean, atmosphere and cryosphere have influenced ice-sheets in the past, and what expectations will be in the future with a special focus on quantifying the contributions to global sea level change. They aim to quantify the Antarctic ice sheet’s contribution to past and future global sea-level change.
Near-term Variability and Prediction of the Antarctic Climate System (AntClimnow). AntClimnow will investigate the prediction of near-term conditions in the Antarctic climate system on timescales of years to multiple decades. They will take an integrated approach, looking beyond climate projections of the physical system to consider the Antarctic environment as a whole.
“There is a lot of opportunities for South African Researchers to participate within these new programmes” – Bettine van Vuuren. Please contact the various Chief Officers for more information on how to become involved.
Today on International Women’s Day we are celebrating all those women involved within the South African National Antarctic Programme (SANAP). 
Within SANAP, women take on many roles. Throughout SANAP we find women in leadership positions which we celebrate; the Minister of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, Minister Babara Creecy, the Director at Knowledge Advancement and Support (KAS) of the National Research Foundation Tracy Klarenbeek, Deputy Directors 
In the science environment there are many Principal Investigators and the chair for the 
BIOGRIP comprises four research ‘nodes’ based at the Universities of Cape Town (focusing on isotope biogeochemistry), Stellenbosch (water and soil biogeochemistry), Free State (mineral biogeochemistry) and North-West University (atmospheric biogeochemistry), with the administrative ‘hub’ located at UCT. The 
“Biogeochemistry” is the study of how biological, geological, chemical, and physical processes interact to shape natural environments over time and space. It covers a range of interdisciplinary research foci, from the origin and diversification of life, to how anthropogenic drivers alter modern environments, to the response of natural systems to environmental change. Biogeochemistry was identified by the 2016 South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR) document as an emerging interdisciplinary field of strategic importance. SARIR recommends that the central objective of biogeochemical research in South Africa should be to gain “further insight into the interactions of human activity and the environment over the past several hundred millennia and to determine how the environmental impact of anthropogenic activity has contributed to the change in Earth system dynamics (chemical, physical and biological). This includes the search for an understanding of the behavior of well characterized and emerging pollutants and their current impact on the environment”. There are a number of strong research groups in South Africa already investigating various aspects of this broad research objective, but their efforts to-date have been isolated and/or fragmented. Moreover, biogeochemistry requires high precision data and measurements of a vast range of inorganic and organic chemical components, including isotope ratios and trace elements, some of which cannot currently be made in South Africa and many of which cannot be run at the volume and quality required. The investment in BIOGRIP will provide the platform to drive biogeochemical knowledge creation through investment in (1) technical capacity, training and scientific leadership in biogeochemical research, (2) world-class analytical facilities, and (3) improved monitoring of biogeochemical environmental variables through the generation and compilation of statistically meaningful datasets.
BIOGRIP will provide significant opportunities to advance South Africa’s research infrastructure and technical capacity in the field of biogeochemistry, while also facilitating a high level of scientific impact on a range of temporal and spatial scales. BIOGRIP will extend the practical research questions that address specific South African problems to include those that are purely curiosity-driven, creative, and/or risky, while also deepening the extent to which ongoing research themes can be probed. An additional impact of developing analytical capacity in-country is the potential for creative methods development, particularly South African-specific applications (e.g., for research questions relevant to the Cape floristic kingdom, hominin evolution, water availability and quality, Antarctic ecosystems, etc.). This will allow the South African research community to push the frontiers of knowledge in a variety of fields where biogeochemical techniques have yet to be applied (or have yet to be applied at the resolution offered by BIOGRIP).
