Our colleague received a scholarship from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR).
Head of International Scientific & Technical Cooperation Department of the National Antarctic Scientific Center Andrii Fedchuk has become one of three recipients of the 2024 SCAR Visiting Scholarship.
We remind you that SCAR is a leading international organization charged with initiating, developing and coordinating high quality international scientific research in the Antarctic region.
Andriy will use his scholarship for a short-term trip to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). There, he will learn from best practices to improve the scientific substantiation of establishing a protected area in Antarctica.
For several years, Ukraine has been taking the initiative to create such an area on ecologically vulnerable islands in the area of Akademik Vernadsky station. However, China has consistently blocked the creation of this protected area, as well as other similar initiatives proposed by a number of countries, as apparently insufficiently substantiated.
Great Britain has best practice in managing multi-scale and multi-component protected areas. Therefore, based on the results of Andrii’s work at BAS, further development of the initiative proposed by Ukraine is expected.
“I plan to work everything out down to the smallest detail so that China has fewer formal grounds to block our environmental initiative,” Andrii noted.
The visit is tentatively scheduled for spring 2025. We’ll tell you about its results.
In the meantime, we congratulate Andrii on the scholarship and recognition of the importance of the mentioned topic. We believe that this will strengthen Ukraine’s position in the international arena and contribute to the preservation of vulnerable Antarctic nature, despite the position of some unfriendly states.
It is worth noting that this is the second time that NACS representatives have received SCAR Visiting Scholarship.
In 2019, it was obtained by Larysa Samchyshyna, the leading researcher of the NASC Scientific and Organizational Department. Dr Samchyshyna’s Visiting Scholarship was hosted by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). The main objective was to standardize methods of measurement and taxonomy of krill larvae.
Also, three times scientists from NASC won another SCAR award — the SCAR Fellowship Programme for the implementation of scientific projects. In 2019, Mariia Pavlovska became a Fellow, in 2021 – Ievgeniia Prekrasna, and in 2022 – Hanna Yevchun (all researchers in the field of biology).
