Green Watch Monitoring Report
Russia is experiencing significant impacts from climate change, with its territory warming at almost twice the global rate. According to Sergey Semenov, scientific director of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology in Moscow, the Far North region of Russia is heating up the fastest. The average annual global surface temperature has increased by 0.179 degrees Celsius every decade from 1976 to 2020, while temperatures over land have increased by 0.295C. However, Russia's territory has been warming almost twice as fast as land globally, at 0.51C per decade.
The Taymyr Peninsula, Russia's largest peninsula located in the Far North, has seen the fastest temperature increase, with an average temperature rise of 0.8C to 1.2C over the past 10 years. This is 2.5 to 2.8 times faster than the global average, and scientists expect this trend to continue.
Precipitation patterns in Russia are more complex, with an overall increase in precipitation but noticeable decreases in annual precipitation in the north of Western Siberia and the Far East. Summer precipitation is also decreasing in these regions, which is unfavorable for agriculture.
Snow cover is decreasing in many areas, including Russia's European part, which is particularly unfavorable for agriculture. The warming is disrupting the thermal regime of permafrost conditions, increasing soil temperatures and the depth of seasonal thawing. This reduces the reliability of foundations for residential buildings and technical structures.
Russia has also been experiencing waves of extreme heat, with prolonged spells of dry and hot weather affecting human lives and creating conditions for more intense forest and wildfires. In 2023, 71 extremely hot days were recorded in Russian cities, with the longest heat waves in Kazan, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and Astrakhan.
This extreme heat is increasing the danger of climate-related diseases and infections, such as ixodes tick-borne borreliosis and tick-borne viral encephalitis. However, Russia could also benefit from the current warming trends, such as the decrease in ice cover along the Northern Sea Route, potentially enhancing its economic use.
The melting ice could open avenues for development in the Arctic territory, removing obstacles for sea navigation and mining of natural resources. The heat is also increasing and opening up new opportunities for crop production, with longer warm spells beneficial for a wider range of plants.
Semenov emphasized the need for global climate justice, calling for concrete steps and stressing the importance of avoiding misleading global estimates. Scientists often say global agricultural productivity will increase with a 1C to 2C rise in average global temperature, but this is a generalization, and productivity could increase in some countries and drop in others.
Humanity may need to develop a general idea of the proportions on which to focus when it comes to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to a changing climate. This proportion should be determined based on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for all countries, which is an extremely difficult task. Solving the climate problem is only one of the goals of sustainable development.
Courtesy to Turkish news agency Anadolu Agency
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