The National Polar Conference is an important opportunity to bring people together, enabling the entire scientific community to exchange ideas and collaborate on a major issue today: the environmental and climatic changes taking place in the Arctic and Antarctic, which affect the regulation of the global climate. This is the point emphasised by Andrea Lenzi, President of Italy’s National Research Council, who also stresses that the highest priority in this process is to invest in data and make them interoperable, shareable and accessible