In Europe, one of the worst environmental catastrophes of recent decades is unfolding: after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, 42,000 people are threatened by flooding, and pollutants are spilling onto fields and into the sea. Farmers in the region depend on water from the reservoir, which is now rapidly draining. Therefore, the people on the lower reaches of the Dnieper and in the Crimea are threatened with long-term bottlenecks in the water supply.
With all this devastation (read more on what’s happening in Ukraine in our live blog), it’s understandable that news of another environmental catastrophe this week tended to stay under the radar. As a recent study shows, the Arctic could be regularly ice-free in summer as early as the 2030s – namely in September, when sea ice is usually at its lowest. “We can no longer prevent the sea ice from disappearing in September,” climate researcher Dirk Notz told my colleague Benjamin von Brackel. In his analysis (SZ Plus) you can read why not even ambitious climate protection can change anything about this development.
In view of the rapid changes, the Arctic urgently needs protection, the riparians have to leave the region alone and talk about how the ecosystems can best be preserved. But the opposite is happening right now, the Arctic Council is experiencing a political ice age. This body was originally set up to make the Arctic a zone of peace and cooperation. However, last year all other members of the Arctic Council renounced cooperation with Russia. And the Putin regime is unabashedly promoting its own geopolitical interests with its new Arctic strategy, as Scandinavia correspondent Alex Rühle explains (SZ Plus).
But what happens at the poles affects all of humanity. This is shown not least by the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. At the beginning of the year, the authors Christof Gertsch and Mikael Krogerus described what its melting would mean for the habitability of the earth in this very readable text (SZ Plus).
(This text is from the weekly Newsletter climate friday you here for free can order.)