Climate Change in Arctic

Subject – Environment

Context – The Arctic Circle has continued to warm at more than twice the rate as the rest of the world through 2021

Concept –

People living in the cold but rapidly warming Arctic region seem to be trapped between two crises: The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and a changing climate.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing challenges for Alaska natives in accessing traditional foods,” said the Arctic Report Card published recently by the Arctic Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It was only “the strength of indigenous cultural and economic practices such as food sharing networks that helped mitigate these challenges,” found the report.
- One such network is the Indigenous Food Knowledges Network, which operates in the Arctic and the United States mid-west, bridging the two diverse regions.
The Arctic Ocean is acidifying faster than the rest of the global oceans, which threatens the entire ecosystem that the ocean supports.
The Arctic Circle, one of the most climatologically important regions on the planet, has continued to warm at more than twice the rate as the rest of the world through 2021.
The warming has also caused major disruptions in the ecology of the Arctic region. Scientists observed a higher ocean primary productivity than the long-term average between 2003 and 2020.
- Ocean primary productivity is measured in terms of the extent of phytoplankton in the oceans, which form the first link in the food web of most marine ecosystems.