Environmental impact assessments of scientific fieldwork as a path to sustainability: A case study from the MOSAiC expedition

Polar environments are increasingly important to study as they are some of the regions most dramatically impacted by climate change. However, large field campaigns in these remote and sensitive regions may have impacts on both the local environment they aim to study and the global climate. Understanding the impact of such activities is necessary to weigh the costs and benefits and minimize negative impacts. This study provides the first example of a methodology to conduct an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for a polar research expedition at sea. We first summarize prior work on quantifying the environmental impact of polar science (including those stipulated by the Antarctic Treaty) and highlight the need for a similar process in the Arctic. The proposed methodology for measuring the impact of Arctic expeditions at sea includes a collection of data that should be gathered pre-, during, and post-expedition. Future seagoing expeditions can follow this framework to quantify their impact. The methodology is applied to quantify the impact of the scientific component of the 2019–2020 MOSAiC expedition to highlight the value of this process and potential blind spots. Our main takeaways include the need for (i) standardization of EIAs to allow comparison, (ii) better preparation of logistic parameters and opportunistic data collection in the lead-up to the expedition, (iii) life cycle assessments for on-ice instrument deployments, water, and waste disposal, (iv) revisiting the EIA upon expedition completion, and publishing lessons learnt. We provide a methodology for scientific EIAs that balances being easily implementable and sufficiently detailed, such that we can build up a database of assessments across a range of expeditions that can, in the future, be used to make recommendations on how to best reduce impacts on the polar environment.