Russia–Ukraine War Leaves Scientists Struggling To Investigate Arctic Changes

The study of how climate change has affected the Arctic is being hampered due to missing data resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, no data has been released from Russian stations in the Arctic, according to a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine hampers the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biasing the view on Arctic change," the authors wrote in the paper.

"Excluding Russian stations lowers representativeness markedly, with some biases being of the same magnitude as the expected shifts caused by climate change by the end of the century."

The eight countries with territory within the Arctic Circle include Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark (Greenland), and Iceland, of which Russia is the largest.

These countries comprise the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum designed to coordinate activities and research across the Arctic.

The Arctic Council was paused after the invasion of Ukraine, and has only recently resumed, without the input of Russia.

International scientists have therefore been missing data from the Russian section of the Arctic regarding annual average temperature, total rain, snow depth, soil moisture, vegetation, biomass and soil carbon—hampering balanced analysis of climate change.

This will make it more difficult to quantify the future of climate change across the region, the researchers explained.

"While many of the key indicators of Arctic climate change and climate-induced responses can be estimated remotely, much of the understanding of Arctic change is based on in situ data measured on the ground at research stations," the authors wrote.

"As ground-based observations that form the basis for assessments of the region's state will now come mainly from the non-Russian parts of the Arctic, the overall ability to monitor the status and trajectory of the Arctic biome may be severely limited over the foreseeable future."

The study of how the Arctic Cirlce is changing is crucially important, as the region is warming at between two to four times the average global rate.

The researchers estimate that the exclusion of Russian data has amplified a bias in climate forecasting in the Arctic across some ecosystem variables, one that was already present even when all Russian stations were included in the dataset.

"Logistical constraints and limited long-term funding for conducting research and monitoring in vast and remote areas have led to the establishment of only relatively few research stations scattered across the Arctic without an optimal statistically determined sampling regime," the authors wrote.

"Most ground-based data collection — and the resultant scientific publications — are therefore spatially clumped, and may thus not be representative of the Arctic region as a whole. Siberia and the Canadian high Arctic appear particularly under-represented."

The authors suggest that this bias may have originated out of the locations the stations gathering the data, as some are situated in Arctic areas that are warmer and wetter, with low biomass and deeper snowpacks.

And this bias only increases when the Russian stations — such as those in the taiga forests of Siberia — are removed from the data altogether.

The researchers hope that their paper will highlight the importance of distributing research stations across the Arctic region, as well as how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has only widened our knowledge gap of how the Arctic is changing with the climate.

"Being a region characterized by rapid climate change, the loss of Siberian research stations may be particularly detrimental for the ability to track global implications of thawing permafrost, shifts in biodiversity, including shrubification and carbon dynamics," the authors wrote.

They added: "Notably, for some variables (for example, precipitation and vegetation biomass) the offset increase was of a similar magnitude as the shifts inflicted by almost 80 years of projected climate change."

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