An international team of scientists from Finland, Norway, Russia and the United States has concluded that due to global warming and melting permafrost, up to 70 percent of infrastructure in the northern polar regions could be destroyed over the next 30 years. This was announced in a press release on Phys.org.
Researchers estimate that by 2050, about three quarters of the population (about 3.6 million people) living in permafrost areas will be affected by damage to communications and buildings. For example, in Alaska, the Transalaska oil pipeline will be under threat, 547 kilometers of which runs in vulnerable regions. Its rupture will lead to oil spills and environmental disasters. At the same time, Arctic infrastructures will be in danger even if the Paris Agreement is reached.
According to the 2015 Paris Agreement, the rise in global average temperature must be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent a catastrophic climate change scenario. In September 2018, it was reported that an international team of scientists from Austria, France, Great Britain, Germany and Switzerland had come to the conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions were inevitably exceeded.