ARKHANGELSK, May 28. /TASS/. Risks, related to the Arctic climate’s changes, affect practically all spheres of life in high latitudes - from health to the economy, experts told TASS during the Arctic Science Summit Week. The scientists say this factor should be considered in work on all documents, regulating the Russian Arctic zone.
"Negative consequences from the climate changes, which are forecasted to be most active in the circumpolar regions, will affect both the people and the economy, and thus it is most important to realize what part of the Russian Arctic’s socio-economic potential could be affected most of all," an expert of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Economic Forecast Svetlana Badina told TASS.
"These consequences should be addressed in strategic planning, in state programs."
One of the consequences is the permafrost’s thawing. "The territories like the Norilsk industrial district are highly vulnerable," she said. "If the temperature range, used during the construction, changes, the risks buildings may break down are very high."
The medical aspect
Another negative consequence from the climate change is that pathogens of dangerous diseases tend to migrate further to the north.
"Before 1986, we [the Arkhangelsk Region] did not have tick-borne encephalitis, and now ticks survive the warm winters, and people have to get adapted," Director of the Northern State Medical University’s Arctic Medicine Institute Galina Degteva told TASS.
However, she continued, higher air and water temperatures in the Arctic cause growing infections, which fish may carry. "In warm water, microorganisms multiply faster, fish suffer from parasitic diseases, the number of helminths is growing - this is a very big problem," she said. The indigenous peoples are risking most of all, because they eat raw fish, she added.
Another problem is cattle disposal pits, which previously, in the frozen ground, did not cause any fears. "Now that the frozen soil thaws, the danger of anthrax is higher," the professor added.
Bifurcation point
According to Anna Timofeyeva, an expert in ice regime and forecasts at the Arctic and Antarctic Studies Institute, the recent decade-long monitoring of marine ice shows that the thawing in the Arctic may either continue or change for the opposite.
"We register one common tendency - the amount of ice in the seas is declining," she told TASS. "Over recent ten years, we have seen divergent moments."
"Over recent ten years, in some sees we see that the trend is close to nil, or we may see growing ice at the polar stations," she added.
The experts have analyzed not only the modern data, received from satellites and polar stations, but also information accumulated during the Soviet period.
The expert does not rule out we are at the point, when the warming tendency is changing for the cooling tendency.
"Another warming happened back in the 1920s-50s, though it was not that intensive, and then came a period of cooling," she said. "The current warming is very strong, much stronger than the period 60 years earlier."
"And still, such a process did exist, and at a certain moment there was a turning point; and thus it is probable that we now observe a bifurcation point, when the process may develop either downwards or upwards," she said.
Arkhangelsk hosts the Arctic Science Summit Week in 2019. It continues from May 22 to May 30. The Arctic Science Summit Week, established by the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), is an annual event, which takes place in different countries. Russia hosts it for the second time. It is the biggest annual international meeting of scientists, who support and promote the Arctic research projects.