What is B2BI?
Bermuda to Bear Island (B2BI) is a strategic framework to address complex, interactive climate, environmental, societal, and technological changes affecting the North Atlantic-Arctic Ocean Region and beyond.
➢ From sub-tropical Bermuda to arctic Bear Island and beyond, the region is subject to interlinked changes in climate, society and ecosystems.
➢ The region is home to hundreds of millions of people in 20 nations and hosts some of the world’s most important fisheries, recreation areas and sea lines of communication for defense and trade.
➢ The changes will have extensive repercussions on ecosystems, economics, politics, security and human well-being from local to global scales.
B2BI aims to co-design use-inspired research on nature, society, culture, and technology to produce knowledge needed for decision making and adaptation actions. The initiative brings together projects, observations, assessments, seminars and other activities across public, private and non-governmental sectors to address needs and interests of the North Atlantic-Arctic Region.
More than a billion people live in the North Atlantic coastal zone. As the world population moves increasingly from the interior to the coastal zone increased ecological pressure is imposed upon coastal regions. Transportation of goods across the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans are immense. An increasing amount of the world’s sea food supply comes from the fertile North Atlantic Ocean. Consequently, its people depend upon on the oceans supporting, regulating, provisioning and cultural services which are not uniformly distributed but vary throughout its regions.
B2BI Critical Issues
The set of environmental- and sustainability-related issues has been selected based on their beneficial and/or adverse influenceson the socio-economics, societal well-being, and ecosystem productivity for the nations and people of the North Atlantic-Arctic region, both at present and in the future. Advances in natural and social sciences have the potential for providing research-based evidence about these issues, improved predictions and longer-term projections. Planning and decision-making on short-to-long term governance and infrastructure to achieve sustainable development will be better informed.
See the full list of B2BI Critical Issues
B2BI Core Regions
National and sectorial approaches alone are inadequate to provide guidelines for a sustainable future for the interlinked regional domains and its knowledge-based resource- and ecosystem management. Thus, an integrative, but also large-scale regional perspective of the North Atlantic Ocean is inevitable. The challenges of the future are basin-wide, multidisciplinary, and integrative and this is the principal perspective of B2BI. Thus, an integrative, but also large-scale regional perspective of the North Atlantic Ocean is inevitable.
Learn more about the Core Regions
Value Cycle Approach
A “Value Cycle Approach” has been developed for B2BI as a methodology to implement the Strategic Framework which explores the complex changes governing the future of the B2BI nations. The value cycle joins discoveries made through research and the translation of research results into applications. The cycle is driven by curiosity, an essential virtue of the value chain participants, the users, researchers, communicators, forecasters, policymakers, or technologists. The continual need for new information and knowledge fuels the cycle.
Read more about our Value Cycle Approach
Declaration to Stakeholders
B2BI is advocating to change the interaction between research cbiology and oceanography, as well as for the land-based operations using the marine environment. This will take a cultural shift which will be hard. Knowledge, trust and confidence need to build. Without mutual trust and confidence, no shared description of reality is possible.
To start with we hope to initiate this shift by entering into discussion with one or a few major stakeholders in Europe and the US.
Read the full Declaration to Stakeholders
