LONDON. — Dozens of international scientists have arrived each year since 2000 at Russia’s remote Northeast Science Station on the Kolyma River in Siberia to study climate change in the Arctic environment.
Not this year, though.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry froze the funding used to pay personnel at the research station and to maintain instruments that measure how quickly climate change is thawing Arctic permafrost and how much methane – a potent planet-warming gas – is being released.
The funding freeze will probably lead to an interruption of the continuous measurements at the station dating back to 2013, compromising scientists’ understanding of the warming trend, said Peter Hergersberg, a spokesperson for the Max Planck Society, which is funded by the German state.
“(Russian) colleagues at the Northeast Science Station try to keep the station running,” Hergersberg said. He declined to say how much funding was withheld.
Reuters spoke with more than two dozen scientists about the impact of the Ukraine conflict on Russian science. Many expressed concern about its future after tens of millions of dollars in Western funding for Russian science has been suspended in the wake of European sanctions on Moscow.
Hundreds of partnerships between Russian and Western institutions have been paused if not canceled altogether, the scientists said, as the invasion has unraveled years spent building international cooperation following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.
Many communication channels are closed and research trips have been postponed indefinitely.
The projects affected by the suspension of Western assistance include the construction of high-tech research facilities in Russia, such as an ion collider and a neutron reactor for which Europe had pledged 25 million euros ($27.4 million).
Such technology would unlock a generation of research that could contribute to everything from fundamental physics to the development of new materials, fuels and pharmaceuticals, scientists said.
Another 15 million-euro ($16.7 million) contribution toward designing low-carbon materials and battery technologies needed in the energy transition to combat climate change has also been frozen, after the European Union halted all cooperation with Russian entities last month.
“Emotionally, I can understand this suspension,” said Dmitry Shchepashchenko, a Russian environmental scientist who studies global forest cover and has been affiliated with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria since 2007.
But for science overall, he said: “This is a lose-lose solution. Global issues like climate change and biodiversity … can hardly be solved without Russian territory (and) the expertise of Russian scientists.”
Frozen finances
When the Soviet Union broke apart, Russian spending on science plummeted, and thousands of scientists moved abroad or abandoned their fields altogether.
“We felt as scientists that our work was not appreciated,” said permafrost scientist Vladimir Romanovksy, who moved his work to Fairbanks, Alaska, in the 1990s. “There was practically no funding, especially for field work.”
Russian funding has since improved, but remains far below that of the West. In 2019, Russia spent 1% of its GDP on research and development – or about $39 billion, adjusted for currency and price variation – according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Most of that money has been spent in physical science fields, such as space technology and nuclear energy.
By comparison, Germany, Japan and the United States each spend around 3% of their respective GDPs. For the United States, that amounted to $612 billion in 2019.
Russian science got a boost, though, from partnerships on projects with scientists abroad.
Russia and the United States, for example, led the international consortium that launched the International Space Station in 1998.
The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said this month it would suspend its participation in the space station until sanctions tied to the Ukraine invasion are lifted.
Russian scientists also helped build the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, known as CERN. In 2012, the collider made the breakthrough discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, which until then had only been theorized.
Scientific camaraderie with Europe continued uninterrupted after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. But CERN’s governing council announced last month it was suspending any new collaboration with Russia.
