The current state and trajectories of future development of natural landscapes in high latitudes of Northern Eurasia are defined inter alia by (1) current unsatisfactory social and economic situation in boreal Northern Eurasia; (2) the dramatic magnitude of on-going and expected climatic change (warming up to 10-12C under global warming at 4C); (3) increasing anthropogenic pressure, particularly in regions of intensive oil and gas exploration and extraction; (4) large areas of sparsely populated and practically unmanaged land; (5) vulnerability of northern ecosystems which historically developed under cold climates and buffering capacity of which is not well known; (6) risk of catastrophic natural disturbances (fire, insect outbreaks) whose frequency and severity have accelerated during recent decades; and (7) high probability of irreversible changes of vegetation cover. These specifics are overlapped with insufficient governance of natural renewable resources (e.g., forests) and destructed practice of industrial development of new territories (oil and gas extraction and exploration, metallurgy etc.).
А. Shvidenko, Liudmila Mukhortova, Ekaterina Kapitsa, Florian Kraxner, Linda See, Anton I. Pyzhev, Roman V. Gordeev, Stanislav Fedorov, В. Н. Коротков, С.А. Барталев, Dmitry Schepaschenko
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