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Russian collaboration loss risks permafrost carbon emissions network

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 410–411 (2024)Cite this article

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While never overshadowing the dominant influence of human activities, additional greenhouse gas emissions from warming Arctic permafrost are expected to accelerate future climate change by 10–20%1,2,3,4. The Russian Federation contains two-thirds of the northern permafrost area5,6 and the loss of access to permafrost carbon flux sites and data due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens scientists’ ability to detect this climate feedback.

Scientists are working to improve the Arctic carbon flux network, by increasing the number of sites and pushing the data processing and reporting towards real-time (annual) updates. Analogous to weather monitoring, real-time methane and carbon dioxide measurements do not slow emissions, but instead provide knowledge about the speed and strength of the permafrost carbon feedback to climate change. By 2100, the Arctic is expected to release permafrost carbon with the climate impact of a large, industrialized nation1, and that must be accounted for as nations around the world determine their own greenhouse gas emission levels aimed at meeting specified temperature targets.

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Fig. 1: Regions of environmental space described by the Arctic carbon monitoring network that are affected by loss of Russian science collaborations.

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was based on support provided by the following programmes: NSF PLR Arctic System Science Research Networking Activities (RNA) Permafrost Carbon Network: Synthesizing Flux Observations for Benchmarking Model Projections of Permafrost Carbon Exchange (2019–2023) grant no. 1931333 (E.A.G.S.), the Minderoo Foundation (E.A.G.S.); European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 951288, Q-Arctic) (M.P. and M.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Edward A. G. Schuur

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

    Edward A. G. Schuur

  3. Department of Biogeochemical Signals, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

    Martijn Pallandt & Mathias Göckede

Authors
  1. Edward A. G. Schuur
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  2. Martijn Pallandt
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  3. Mathias Göckede
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Contributions

All authors contributed substantially to this work. Based on previous collaborative work by the author group, E.A.G.S. conceived the initial idea and wrote the draft, and M.P. and M.G. provided the analysis with the figure, and contributed to the written text.

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Correspondence to Edward A. G. Schuur.

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Schuur, E.A.G., Pallandt, M. & Göckede, M. Russian collaboration loss risks permafrost carbon emissions network. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 410–411 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02001-6

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