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Introduction

Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) of the International Council for Science (ICSU) has been invited by the SCAR Delegation from the Russian Federation to hold the 30th SCAR Business meeting and Open Science Conference in St. Petersburg in July 2008. 

This is a key meeting for SCAR, not only because it will be the first SCAR meeting since the start of the International Polar Year (IPY) in March 2007, but also because 2008 marks SCAR's 50th Anniversary. SCAR is the leading international body for coordinating and facilitating scientific research in Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean. The 34 national Members of SCAR are the national academies of science of the various countries. SCAR also provides the means for scientists from around the world to get together regularly in international fora where they can exchange ideas, develop networks of contacts, and start planning new joint programmes. The Open Science Conferences facilitate this process. They began in Bremen, Germany, in 2004, and continued in Hobart, Australia, in 2006. The St. Petersburg conference is thus the third in the series. 

The 4-day conference in July 2008 differs from its predecessors in that it is being jointly organized by SCAR and its Arctic counterpart, the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). IASC has the same responsibilities for the Arctic as SCAR for the Antarctic, and likewise represents a number of countries.It is also being co-sponsored by ICSU and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). These developments reflect the fact that we are now in the International Polar Year, which began in March 2007 and will extend to March 2009. ICSU and WMO are co-sponsors of the IPY, which has a bipolar theme. The IPY Joint Committee has endorsed this event as the first in a series of international interdisciplinary IPY conferences.

Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) is also one of the organizers of the Conference together with the Russian Academy of Science.

SCAR and IASC have combined forces to reflect this bipolar theme. As a result, the title of the conference is "Polar Research - Arctic and Antarctic Perspectives in the International Polar Year". The science program of the OSC consist of 29 sessions organized to reflect the IPY themes (1) Status and Change, (2) Polar/Global Linkages, (3) A Sense of Discovery, (4) The Poles as a Vantage Point for Observations and (5) Peoples and Resources at the Poles.