As climate changes, Soviet environmental ills felt once again

Antoine Blua in Radio Free Europe: The Nenets, an indigenous people living in Russia's Arctic, are traditional nomads, decamping every year to seek out fresh pastures for their reindeer herds. But that unique lifestyle is threatened. Nenets herders in the remote Yamal Peninsula complain that a steady rise in temperatures in recent years is making it harder to predict the weather. That in turn has affected the tundra's vegetation, the only source of food for the reindeer.

One of Yamal's Nenets residents, Yakov Yaptik, told Reuters the changing climate is also affecting the herders' seasonal migrations. "With global warming, the snow started to melt much faster," Yaptik said. "Before, it would start melting in May; now it is all melted by the end of April, and that causes problems for our migration because the deer have trouble walking over the tundra when the snow has completely melted."

As more than 15,000 officials from 192 countries prepared to attend a critical United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen on December 7-18, the World Bank has warned that the former Soviet Union as a whole is already experiencing the consequences of climate change.

The bank's report, titled "Adapting to Climate Change in Europe and Central Asia" and released in June, says the fallout includes increasing irregularity in the weather, warmer temperatures, windstorms, and changing distribution of water resources.

The World Bank says temperatures will continue to rise everywhere in the region, with the greatest changes occurring in the northernmost latitudes. At the same time, water availability is projected to decrease everywhere but Russia. Even as much of the region is faced with possible droughts, floods are expected to become more common and severe. Meanwhile, rising sea levels are set to affect the Baltic and Black seas and the Arctic Ocean….

Members of the Nenets near Krasnoyarsk, shot by Dr. A. Hugentobler, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License