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Climate change in Russia

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Climate change in Russia

Climate change has serious effects on Russia's climate, including average temperatures and precipitation, as well as permafrost melting, more frequent wildfires, flooding and heatwaves. Changes may affect inland flash floods, more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion reduced snow cover and glacier melting, and may ultimately lead to species losses and changes in ecosystem functioning.

Russia is part of the Paris Agreement that the rise in global average temperature should be kept way below 2 °C. Since Russia is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, action is needed to reduce the impacts of climate change on both regional and global scale.

Greenhouse gas emissions by Russia are mostly from fossil gas, oil and coal. Russia emits 2 or 3 billion tonnes CO2eq of greenhouse gases each year; about 4% of world emissions. Annual carbon dioxide emissions alone are about 12 tons per person, more than double the world average. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore air pollution in Russia, would have health benefits greater than the cost. The country is the world's biggest methane emitter, and 4 billion dollars' worth of methane was estimated to leak in 2019/20.

According to IPCC (2007), climate change affected temperature increase which is greater at higher northern latitudes in many ways. For example, agricultural and forestry management at Northern Hemisphere higher latitudes, such as earlier spring planting of crops, higher frequency of wildfires, alterations in disturbance of forests due to pests, increased health risks due to heat-waves, changes in infectious diseases and allergenic pollen and changes to human activities in the Arctic, e.g. hunting and travel over snow and ice. From 1900 to 2005, precipitation increased in northern Europe and northern and central Asia. Recently these have resulted in fairly significant increases in GDP. Changes may affect inland flash floods, more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion, reduced snow cover and species losses.

At present, the average annual temperature in the western regions of Russia rises by 0.4 – 0.5 °C every decade. This is due to both an increase in the number of warm days, and also a decrease in the number of cold days, since the 1970s. The occurrence of extremely hot days in the summer season has increased over the past 50 years, and the number of summer seasons with extremely hot days between 1980 and 2012 has doubled compared to the preceding three decades.

Over the last 100 years, the warming in Russia has been around 1.29 degrees Celsius, while warming on the global scale has been a, 0.74 degrees, according to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing that the warming of the Russian climate is happening at a faster rate than average. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures are rising at double the rate of the global average, 0.2 degrees per decade over the past 30 years. The annual surface air temperature maxima and minima both increased, and the number of days with frost decreased over the last 100 years. The warming has been most evident in the winter and spring periods, and is more intense in the eastern part of the country, according to the Inter-Agency Commission of the Russian Federation on Climate Change, 2002. As a consequence, a lengthening of the vegetation period is seen across much of Russia, with the earlier onset of spring, and later beginning of autumn.

Patterns in precipitation changes are harder to identify, on average, increases in annual precipitation (7.2 mm/10 years) between 1976 and 2006 were observed in Russia in general. However, differing regional patterns have also been observed. A clear pattern is an increase in spring precipitation of 16.8mm per decade in Siberia and western parts of Russia, and a general decrease in precipitation in eastern regions.

Changes in snow cover and depth over the last 30 years show that snow cover decreased considerably in the western regions of Russia, as it did in the northern hemisphere in general. A general decrease in snow cover depth was also observed in western parts of the country. The main reason for this is the rise in temperatures. However, the increase in precipitation at higher latitudes has also led to an observed increase in snow accumulation in regions where winter temperatures remain cool enough.

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