Climate change pushes Siberians to tread on thin ice — literally

Kostya Germogin is sitting in his van in a snowbound car park, waiting for it to be loaded up before a journey over a frozen, fog-shrouded river.

This, though, is no normal river crossing. Every year, when the ice on the River Lena stops the ferry working, it eventually gets thick enough to serve as a makeshift roadbridge to the nearby city of Yakutsk.

Or, at least, it used to. With global temperature rises now affecting even Siberian cities like Yakutsk - one of the world's coldest places - the time when the Lena's ice is declared safe enough to drive on arrives later every year.

Mr Germogin, however, has a living to earn, and does not have time to wait for the official all-clear, which would normally have come weeks ago. So off he sets across the ice sheet - undeterred by the risk of plunging through the ice, a fate that kills numerous drivers every year.

Just two weeks earlier, on the same stretch of the Lena, a van fell through, with the driver and three passengers lucky to escape.

“Of course I’m scared,” says Mr Germogin, 33, who doesn’t stop the engine for fear it will never start again in the freezing cold.

“But you have to get used to it. There’s no other choice. We need to get the goods to the other side.”

Ice roads have long been part of the transport infrastructure around Yakutsk, where temperatures sometimes plunge as low as minus 64C.

With winter lasting for the better half of the year, residents rely on them as the only land link between Yakutsk and communities on the  Lena’s far side. Mr Germogin makes the journey despite knowing that his own vehicle is also at least two tonnes overweight, making it even more likely to break the ice.

Arian Tastygin, a maintenance worker whose job is to check vans entering the road on the Yakutsk side, is fatalistic about the risks that drivers take every day.

“People are obviously trying to get through. Everything here relies on winter roads,” he told the Telegraph from his cabin on the Lena's bank.

The shortening of the ice-road season shows how climate change in this part of Russia’s far north - which stands on perennially frozen ground – is disrupting people’s livelihoods.

The ice roads are typically in use between November and April. But this year, one of Yakutsk’s main ice roads, linking it to a railway station that brings goods from China and Russia's Far East, did not open until early December, about three weeks later than usual.

“Winter roads come into operation later in the year as the ice takes longer to form and it begins to melt earlier in the spring, cutting the season short,” says Dr Lyudmila Lebedeva, a scientist with Yakutsk's Melnikov Permafrost Institute, which studies Siberia’s perennially frozen soil.

“There used to be winters here when the ice on the Lena was two metres thick - we don’t see that anymore.”

Impact models calculated by Dr Lebedeva and her team predict that the ice roads season on the Lena could drop by much as 50 days by the end of the century due to climate change. Already, the ice here is now only two-thirds as thick as it was 60 years ago, according to research by the Hype-Eras project which studies permafrost and resilience in Russia's Arctic and Sub-Arctic.

Dr Alexander Fedorov, the director of the Melnikov institute, has a map of the surrounding state of Yakutia - a region nearly as large as India in size - over his desk. It shows different climate zones layered one over the other, going north all the way up to the Arctic coast.

Just in his own lifetime, a temperature increase of between one and two degrees has caused the warmer climate zones to migrate several hundred kilometres further north.

Admittedly, to the average wintertime visitor to Yakutsk, the idea of global warming can seem far off. When The Telegraph was there in early December,  the temperature was no higher than minus 41C, and even several layers of thermal underwear felt like little protection. But winters here have nonetheless been getting milder and later.

Nadezhda Novopriyezzhaya, the acting director of a museum and nature reserve on the banks of the River Lena, who is wearing traditional reindeer skin boots and a fur coat, recalls how uneasy locals were about this year's unseasonably warm November.

“Everyone would ask: What happened?" she said. "When is it going to get cold?”

Locals have reported a patchy supply of goods in local shops, while farmers have seen disruptions to their routine. They typically cull their animals with the arrival of winter and store the meat outside, instead of buying expensive industrial freezers.

Farmer Maria Dobretsova, 56, had to push back the usual culling period for her cows by 20 days this year before the mercury finally plummeted below -20C.

“It’s not just about the extra time, it’s extra expenses for us to feed them,” she said.

Moving goods across the Lena would be much easier if Moscow, six time zones away, were to give the green light to the ill-fated project of a bridge to serve Yakutsk.

The proposed £1 billion crossing over the Lena has been mired in nearly two decades of delays, and still has not been officially approved.

While Russian government officials still routinely deny the human cause of climate change, Yakutia residents are glad that the Kremlin has least finally acknowledged that climate change is taking place.

Russia adopted the Paris Agreement to fight climate change last year and recently announced its goal for greenhouse emissions. However, it has disappointed climate activists by pegging its projected reduction in emissions to 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was home of some of the world’s worst industrial pollution.

Vladimir Prokopyev, a regional lawmaker, says a bridge over the Lena would be the only viable solution to deal with climate change-induced risks to the ice roads. But the region, he says, simply does not have the necessary funds to build it without Kremlin financing.

“We have high hopes for the bridge,” he says. “If we don’t make this decision now, the economy of this region and the whole country is going to lose billions of roubles."