Scientists warn missing Russian data causes Arctic climate blind spots

The loss of scientific data from Russian Arctic monitoring stations following the invasion of Ukraine has worsened information gaps, which could have serious consequences for monitoring and forecasting change climate change on a global scale, researchers warned on Monday.

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

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

Russia accounts for almost half the area of ​​the entire Arctic region, creating a huge information gap, said lead author Efren Lopez-Blanco of Aarhus University, who led the study. study published in Climate change.

Researchers sought to quantify the impact of this on the scientific understanding of changes occurring in the Arctic.

“One of the immediate problems that arises if we neglect the Russian boreal forest is that we underestimate the biomass, the organic carbon in the soil,” Lopez-Blanco told AFP.

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

Sharing issues

The researchers focused on around sixty research stations that are part of a vast territorial network called INTERACT.

Using computer models, they looked at eight factors, including air temperature, precipitation, snow depth, plant biomass and soil carbon, and found that even before the conflict in Ukraine, the network had gaps, with stations concentrated in warmer and wetter areas, leaving other areas under-represented.

Without Russia, which accounts for 17 of the 60 stations, this bias increased, with the loss of areas such as Siberia’s immense taiga forest.

The research highlights the logistical challenges of monitoring such a large and often inhospitable region, as well as the problems inherent in voluntary data sharing.

As a result, projects have been delayed or canceled, while the Arctic Council regional forum, long touted as a model of cooperation, is now divided between the West (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and United States) and Russia.

Dmitry Streletskiy, a researcher at George Washington University who was not involved in the study and whose work on permafrost involves another monitoring group, CALM, said that at nearly 80 Russian sites registered in their network, about 55 normally share data each year.

But so far only 37 countries have provided data for 2023, he said, although some may send information later.

One solution, he said, would be to treat key climate indicators in the same way as weather data, and have a United Nations system to provide continuous monitoring.

Streletskiy said data is collected but not shared, which could lead to gaps in global understanding.

“It’s like these big collective apartments. You have a lot of rooms, and some neighbors are nice, some aren’t,” he says.

“But if you don’t know your neighbor has a room with a leaky roof, you won’t know until the whole house floods. That’s pretty much what happens.”

© 2024 AFP