Arctic a victim of Russia war

Paris – Loss of scientific data from Russia’s Arctic monitoring stations following the invasion of Ukraine has worsened information gaps, that could have serious implications for tracking and predicting climate change globally, researchers warned.

The Arctic is warming between two and four times faster than the rest of the planet and holds glaciers, forests and carbon-rich frozen soils at risk of irreversible change that could reverberate across the planet.

Monitoring relies heavily on data from stations spread across the vast and diverse region, but Moscow’s assault on Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a freeze in scientific cooperation in the Arctic – and elsewhere.

Russia represents almost half the landmass of the entire Arctic region, creating a massive information gap, said lead author Efren Lopez-Blanco, of Aarhus University, who led the study published in Nature Climate Change.

Researchers sought to quantify just how much of an impact this has had on scientific understanding of the changes taking place in the Arctic.

“One of the immediate issues that arises if we neglect the Russian boreal forest is that we have an underestimation of biomass, soil organic carbon,” Lopez-Blanco said.

“This has potentially global consequences for important processes such as permafrost thawing, shifts in biodiversity or even greenhouse gas emissions.”

The researchers focused on around 60 research stations making up part of a large territorial network called Interact.

Using computer models, they looked at factors such as air temperature, rainfall, snow and soil carbon. –