Permafrost Thaw and Backwards Arctic Incentives Could Add Trillions to Climate Costs

Surrounding the Arctic Ocean, lying along a nearly continuous 10,000 mile (16,000 km) ring of inhospitable tundra, one of Earth’s most important environmental assets is beginning to collapse.

Permafrost — perennially frozen soil and rock — may not look like much, but estimates suggest that vast tracts of icy ground in the northern hemisphere may contain around 1,700 gigatons of trapped carbon. This amount is about twice the size of the approximately 850 gigatons of carbon already contained in the atmosphere, primarily in the form of methane and carbon dioxide.

Permafrost covers about 24 percent of all land in the northern hemisphere — an area of about 9 million square miles, or 23 million square kilometers. As the planet warms, massive regions that have been frozen for tens of thousands of years are beginning to melt. As the authors of a recent article in Nature Communications explain, this melting contributes to a cascading series of events that could severely exacerbate the world’s climate crisis.

As permafrost thaws, it releases trapped carbon back into the atmosphere, which contributes to the greenhouse effect. Because it is typically less reflective than ice, newly thawed ground tends to absorb more sunlight, causing even more melting. These two effects create a nonlinear feedback loop — more melting, more heating, more melting, and so on, at an accelerating rate — with potentially disastrous consequences. The study suggests that, beyond a certain threshold, this feedback loop could “irreversibly shift the planetary system to a new warmer state.”

Preventing such a shift would be monumentally expensive, yet failure to do so may ultimately impose an even higher cost. Using simulations, the study’s authors assessed the net present value of mitigation costs, adaptation costs, and climate-related economic impacts through the year 2300 under various emissions scenarios.

The models estimated that melting permafrost would add $24.8 trillion to the $613 trillion base cost of climate change under a 1.5-degrees Celsius mean warming scenario. In a 2.5-degrees Celsius mean warming scenario, melting permafrost would add $50.3 trillion to an $815 trillion base cost. In a scenario in which all countries meet current emissions pledges (resulting in warming beyond 2.5 degrees Celsius), melting permafrost would add $66.9 trillion to a $1,390 trillion base cost. Finally, in the “most expensive and least desirable” business-as-usual scenario, the base cost reaches a staggering $2,197 trillion (with no statistically significant effect from melting permafrost).

While it’s clear that the “business-as-usual” option leads to the worst outcome globally, the picture become murkier when examined on a smaller scale and a shorter timeframe.

Two countries, Canada and Russia, together contain a large majority of the world’s permafrost cover. Until very recently, much of this frozen land has resisted human encroachment — with harsh landscapes such as Siberia and northern Canada only supporting tiny, precarious pockets of settlement. Now, a warming climate is beginning to make previously unusable land more suitable for large-scale exploitation.

In a warmer world, Canada and Russia could stand to gain millions of square miles of thawed land. This land could be used to expand agriculture, mining, forestry, and other industries — as well as to build all of the roads, rails, pipelines, and other infrastructure necessary to connect new northern development with the rest of the country and the world beyond.

In the long run, these national benefits do not outweigh the enormous international costs imposed by climate change. However, in the short run, strong profit incentives driven by new economic activity may be too much for policymakers to resist — especially if the benefits are concentrated among a small, influential group of people. In Russia, a country where business oligarchs are closely intertwined with policymaking, President Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that the effects of climate change will be economically beneficial for the nation.

Canada and Russia have both expressed willingness to combat climate change, with the former having ratified and the latter having signed the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. However, both countries remain major fossil fuel producers. Russia is the world’s foremost natural gas exporter and second biggest crude oil exporter, while Canada is fifth in both natural gas and crude oil exports.

During recent summers, unprecedented warm temperatures have caused widespread thawing across the north — devastating rural communities and dramatically reforming the landscape. Heatwaves and strong winds have also led to a spate of serious wildfires, which have scoured tundra landscapes well within the bounds of the Arctic Circle.

The facts place Canada and Russia in an awkward position. Addressing climate change requires a global coalition, and any global coalition requires global buy-in to succeed. Arctic states have an inherent perverse incentive when it comes to climate mitigation: reducing emissions is expensive, whereas there is no short-term cost to doing nothing, and there are likely to be benefits that will come from having access to thawed land. If Canada and Russia start believing that climate change will actually make them better off in the short run, regardless of any long-term effects, then national willingness to pay to mitigate climate change will decline.

While Arctic states wrestle with their priorities, permafrost continues to disappear. Protecting frozen lands will require rapid, decisive action — action that may be spurred by an awareness of just how important, and potentially dangerous, this vital reservoir of trapped carbon really is.

Article source: Yumashev, Dmitry, Chris Hope, Kevin Schaefer, et al. “Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements.” Nature Communications 10, (2019).

Featured photo: cc/(Georgy_Golovin, photo ID: 891436926, from iStock by Getty Images)