Report

Russia: climate sanctioned

A weather station a few kilometers from the village of Berdigestyakh in Yakutia, Russia. © Anissa El Jabri / RFI

Text by: Anissa El Jabri Follow

8 min

Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, hosted an international conference on climate change from 22 to 24 March. But the region, where the consequences of global warming are already very visible, has received very few foreign representatives: with the conflict in Ukraine, even scientific cooperation on climate has been interrupted.

Advertising

Read more

From our Special Envoy,

An international climate conference was a first for Yakutia, whose capital, Yakutsk, is nearly 5,000 kilometers and six time zones from Moscow. Bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, with its approximately 3 million square meters, the region is the largest in Russia. Here, the ground is frozen almost all year round and temperatures can drop below -50 during long winter weeks. At the end of March, it was still between -20 and -15, in a spring light amplified by snow and already almost blinding.

It is at the end of the city center and its concrete buildings that the internationally renowned Permafrost Institute is located. Created in 1960, it hosted on the 3rd and last day of the conference debates on adaptation to climate change. The place had everything to be a buzzing hive of exchanges in all languages. Except that sanctions and the severance of scientific ties have gone through this.

« 

With European countries and the United States, all our expeditions and joint research stopped. There are no joint projects this year, says Mikhail Nikolaevich Zheleznyak, director of the Institute. Without this, inevitably, there can be no conference where we discuss its results. This hinders the development of science. It is very unfortunate that this had to happen and I repeat it often: it slows down not only the development of Russian science, but also the understanding of all the phenomena taking place on the planet.

And this does a lot of harm not only to Russia, but also to the world community, because the problem of climate change, the problem of melting permafrost, the problem of melting ice are global problems, and they must be solved at the global level. »

The foreign scientists present on these three days represented less than ten countries: China, Kazakhstan ... And again, the United States had only one. Egor Kirillin is also sorry. For this zoologist specializing in Arctic species, "animals have no borders" and their common observation is decisive: "The observation of the dynamics of climate change in the world is based on the observation of landscapes and living things, and therefore animals. The polar bear is an inhabitant of the Arctic. When the climate changes, it changes its behavior and lifestyle. So when we observe that his habits are changing, we know 100% that it is related to the climate."

The links forged between scientists, professionals or friends often still persist, but without access to the field, in one year, knowledge has already declined.

► Also listen: News witnesses – Russia: the climate issue, also a victim of the conflict in Ukraine

Main issue: permafrost

The most salient example of the issues: permafrost, the frozen layer that covers about 70% of the soil of the territory, melts faster and faster. "What we call permafrost is a layer of soil that is permanently frozen, for three years or more," says Nikita Tananaev, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk and head of the Northern Climate and Ecosystems Research Laboratory. There is another layer above, which is called in our jargon the "active permafrost", which is the part that thaws and then freezes again depending on the seasons. What is happening now is that this "active" layer increases, and this at the expense of the permanent layer. The permanent layer of permafrost loses on average between 3 and 5 centimeters per year; Which is a lot, because the permanent layer is 60 centimeters."

Weather data is monitored by a hundred weather stations throughout Yakutia. Like the one where we were able to go a few kilometers from the village of Berdigestyahk. With its appearance of a small dark wood house, it opens onto a fenced area. To reach it, a narrow path traced in the snow. "Be careful, the path is bad," warns Isabella Stepanova, the supervisor of the weather station. There was a lot of snow this winter, up to 50 centimeters."

One step too far to the side and that's the fall. We sink up to our knees in the fresh snow. A small figure whose face can barely be seen engorged in her warm dark blue hood, Isabella trots at full speed. She knows the way by heart: a little over 30 years that she has been doing the weather readings here. A very demanding job: the readings must be done every three hours, whether it rains, snows or wind, even by -50 in winter. Most of the work has been automated for a year, but when it breaks down, you have to go out again to do the readings.

Isabella Stepanova proudly presents measuring tools such as wind turbines to measure wind speed: "Thesensors are ten meters above the ground. They record medium and maximum gusts. They are automatic. But this device freezes in winter, so we wrap it with this blanket that you see, here it can go down to -60".

But it is above all the rise in temperatures, which with her team of four people, the supervisor monitors the most. Inside the small wooden chalet, she opens her data collection notebooks, filled with applied writing and details: "Let's take this period that has just passed, from March 11 to 20. We have an average temperature of -15.9 degrees. If we look at the last five years, the average temperature for this period is -20.07. If we calculate the difference, we get an increase of 4.8 degrees

► Read also: Climate change, a threat to permafrost

Huge floods

More heat, it is a permafrost that melts and huge floods in the spring, with very concrete consequences for Natalia Vasilyeva, librarian who with her husband also raises about fifteen horses. "We have land for livestock. But the main activity of our family is horse breeding, and we also make hay for the animals. Every year we collect hay for the winter. But we had a flood last summer and we couldn't pick up anything, because everything, absolutely everything was literally flooded. It was impossible to harvest. So we had to buy fodder. Thanks to grants from a support program, we were able to do so."

This was a first for Natalia Vasilyeva. Next to her, standing in her boots in the spring snow, her friend Evdovkia Sannikova has already suffered another consequence of the accelerated melting of the permafrost: "It's a big problem and it's general. Water appears under the houses, and they begin to sink. Everything becomes very wet, domestic fungi appear. And we all have to go and have a new house built on another part of the territory. It's everywhere and for everyone. We ourselves had to move and have a house rebuilt and borrowed. We have succeeded because of a program for people in need that offers five-year interest-free loans. A few meters away, the poles of a power line are for some a little gurgit. They were built on flat ground now all bumpy, again due to the melting of the permafrost that destabilizes the soil.

Faced with global warming and the end of many cooperation and cross-financing, the Russian authorities have in any case decided to take control. Example with this bill in the Duma under consideration for the establishment of a national permafrost monitoring network. Regional climate adaptation plans are also being finalized.

A takeover that also involves bringing NGOs to heel: organizations or activists, the rankings "foreign agents" have also multiplied in this area. This was the case three weeks ago of the Russian branch of WWF, "too politicized", had already said a month ago the special representative of the president for the environment. Sergey Ivanov also said in an interview with the Tass agency: "Russia, I am absolutely sure, is quite capable of addressing nature protection issues independently, without foreign aid and without receiving lessons."

Newsletter Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

Read on on the same topics:

• Russia
• Climate
• Climate change