How many people live on permafrost? It took an interdisciplinary team to find out

By GRID-Arendal

April 20^th, 2021

How many people live and rely on Arctic permafrost? It might seem like a basic question, but until recently it had never been answered.

“There were just no data on it”, said Justine Ramage, a geographer at Nordregio, a research centre established by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Together with a team of researchers in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 Nunataryuk project, they explored this topic.

The answer they found: 4.9 million people lived in 1,162 permafrost settlements across eight Arctic countries in 2017, the latest year for which data were available. Their findings were recently published in a paper in the journal Population and Environment.

These findings are crucial for understanding how changing and thawing permafrost will affect communities and the day-to-day lives of people who live in the Arctic region. Climate change is causing the Arctic to warm more quickly than any other region on Earth.

“This represents a large number of people at risk in coming decades”, said Ramage, lead author of the paper. “They will have to face major challenges related to thawing permafrost.” It is important to communicate this information to leaders and policymakers within the European Union, Arctic Council, and national governments so they can support this affected population, she added. “I hope this number provides people living on permafrost a way to attract attention to the effect of climate change on their lives.”

Many permafrost inhabitants are seeing changes to their environment and their communities, but not all of them connect these changes to thawing permafrost. “For them, permafrost is simply the ground they are living on and changes have to be considered in a context of a whole socio-ecological change”, said Ramage.

Hunters and fishers in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland.

Ramage and her co-authors projected that the number of people living in permafrost settlements in the Arctic will decline dramatically to 1.7 million by 2050, because the permafrost underlying many communities will thaw and disappear. They estimate that 42 percent of current permafrost settlements will be permafrost-free by mid-century.

Green and brown dots show Arctic permafrost settlements in 2017; by 2060, the brown dots will be permafrost-free.

The Nunataryuk project aims to paint a comprehensive picture of the impacts of changing permafrost in the coastal Arctic, in which social and physical scientists collaborate to understand the impact of permafrost thaw on coastal environments and communities.

The research team for this paper was interdisciplinary, including three social science researchers and three physical science researchers. The team used permafrost data and layered population data on top. “We had to step out of our comfort zone to understand how to combine these sciences”, said co-author Leneisja Jungsberg, a social science researcher at Nordregio.

They first collected data on current and future projected extent of permafrost in the Arctic. Then, by analyzing data from countries’ national statistical institutes on the location and current population of Arctic settlements, they found out how many communities live on or depend on permafrost.

Using population projection models that include variables such as fertility, mortality, and migration, they projected the expected change in population. By combining this data with the projected change to permafrost extent due to rising temperatures, they estimated how many of the original permafrost settlements would be left by 2050 and how many people would live in them. There are many unknowns and variables that will affect Arctic populations in coming decades, but the paper’s projections provide a good basis for starting to plan to support communities and conduct future research.

GRID-Arendal, a Nunataryuk partner organization, is using data from the paper to produce the first maps for a forthcoming atlas of permafrost in the Arctic.

Map produced by GRID-Arendal as part of the Nunataryuk project.

Jungsberg, Ramage, and other colleagues have also been conducting on-the-ground surveys of people living in Arctic communities to find out how they think about and understand permafrost. A new paper about this work will be published in a journal later this spring.

Leneisja Jungsberg, center, and Joan Nymand Larsen, right, talk with schoolteacher Kasper Skifte in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland, about demographic trends in the area.

Local research assistant Kirsten Pedersen, left, discusses the permafrost survey with Leneisja Jungsberg and Joan Nymand Larsen.

This is part of the "Nunataryuk Behind the Scenes" series, a collection of stories about the making of the Arctic Permafrost Atlas.

This story was produced as part of the Nunataryuk project, which is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 773421.