JRL NEWSWATCH: “Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground” – Washington Post/ Anton Troianovski, Chris Mooney, Michael Robinson Chavez, Trish Wilson, Brian Murphy, Brian Malasics

October 7, 2019 JRL Russia List Environment, Far East, Siberia, APEC

Map of Arctic Highlighting Permafrost, adapted from image at nasa.gov

“… The permafrost that once sustained farming – and upon which villages and cities are built – is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth …. In Yakutia … cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent …. Siberians … are being driven to migrate …. An international team of scientists, led by Dmitry A. Streletskiy at George Washington University, estimated … the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion … 7.5 percent of … total annual economic output. … [T]he cost of mitigating … damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050. But people here are used to adapting. They survived the forced collectivization of the early Soviet Union. Gulag prisoners taught them to grow potatoes. After the Soviet Union collapsed and … state farms closed, they shifted to a greater reliance on hunting and fishing. …”