But not this year. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry froze funding used to pay for staff at the research station and to maintain instruments that measure how fast climate change is thawing the permanent Arctic ice and how much methane strong gas that warms the planet – it is released. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register The freezing of funding is likely to lead to the cessation of continuous measurements at the station dating back to 2013, jeopardizing scientists’ understanding of the heating trend, said Peter Hergersberg, a spokesman for Max Planck, a German-funded company. state. “The (Russian) colleagues at the Northeast Science Station are trying to keep the station up and running,” Hergersberg said. He declined to say how much funding was withheld. Reuters spoke to more than two dozen scientists about the impact of the conflict in Ukraine on Russian science. Many have expressed concern about its future following the suspension of tens of millions of dollars in Western funding for Russian science following European sanctions in Moscow. Hundreds of collaborations between Russian and Western institutions have been suspended, if not canceled altogether, scientists say, as the invasion has cleared up years spent building international cooperation since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many channels of communication have been closed and research trips have been postponed indefinitely. Projects affected by the suspension of Western aid include the construction of high-tech research facilities in Russia, such as an ion accelerator and a neutron reactor, to which Europe had pledged 25 million euros ($ 27.4 million). Such technology will 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 ($ 16.7 million) contribution to the design of low-carbon materials and battery technologies needed for the energy transition to combat climate change has also been frozen, as the European Union cut off all cooperation with Russian entities in last month. “Emotionally, I can understand this suspension,” said Dmitry Shepashenko, a Russian environmentalist who has been studying global forest cover and has been working with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria since 2007. But for science as a whole, he said: “This is a solution that will lose and will lose. Global issues such as climate change and biodiversity … can hardly be solved without Russian territory. [and] the know-how of Russian scientists “. FROZEN FINANCIAL When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian spending on science plummeted, and thousands of scientists moved abroad or left the field altogether. “We felt as scientists that our work was not appreciated,” said Vladimir Romanovksy, a permanent frost scientist who moved his work to Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1990s. “There was virtually no funding, especially for field work.” Russian funding has since improved, but remains much lower than 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 fluctuations – according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Most of this money has been spent on science, such as space technology and nuclear power. By comparison, Germany, Japan and the United States spend about 3% of their respective GDP. For the United States, this amounted to $ 612 billion in 2019. However, Russian science received impetus from collaborations on projects with scientists abroad. Russia and the United States, for example, led the International Space Station, which launched the International Space Station in 1998. The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said this month that it would suspend its participation in the space station until sanctions related to the invasion of Ukraine were lifted. Russian scientists have also helped build the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, known as CERN. In 2012, the accelerator made the revolutionary discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, which until then had only been theorized. Scientific fellowship with Europe has continued unabated since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. But CERN’s board announced last month that it had suspended any new cooperation with Russia. Germany alone has provided about 110 million euros ($ 122 million) in more than 300 German-Russian projects over the past three years. An additional € 12.6 million ($ 14 million) in EU funding has been provided to Russian agencies for another 18 projects focusing on everything from Arctic climate monitoring to infectious animal diseases. Chemist Pavel Troshin recently won Russian state funding for his involvement in a Russian-German effort to develop next-generation solar cells to power communications satellites. However, with the German side now suspended, the project is in the air. “Joint projects” are supposed to be for the benefit of the whole world, and the removal of Russian scientists … is really counterproductive, “said Troshin, who works at the Institute of Chemical Physics in Russia. “I would never expect that. It ‘s shocking for me. I’m very upset.” ARTIC UTENSILS Among the most urgent research efforts on the horizon are projects to study climate change in the Russian Arctic. “Two-thirds of the area of permanent frost is in Russia, so data from there is critical,” said Ted Schuur, an environmentalist at the University of Northern Arizona at the Permafrost Carbon Network. “If you cut off your view of changing the permanent frost in Russia, you are actually cutting off our understanding of global changes in permanent frost.” This is worrying for scientists, as global warming is thawing icy ground that contains about 1.5 trillion metric tons of organic carbon – twice the amount already in the atmosphere today. As permanent ice thaws, the organic material trapped inside the ice decomposes and releases more gases that heat the planet, such as methane and carbon dioxide. Scientists fear such emissions could cause climate change to spiral out of control. Scientists can use satellites to monitor changes in the landscape due to thawing, but they can not capture what is happening underground, which requires field research, Schuur said. Russian scientists have been collecting and sharing permanent frost field data for years, but Western researchers are unsure whether these channels of communication will remain open. These datasets were also fragmented, due to limited funding to cover the vast area. Arctic ecologist Sue Natali, at the US Woodwell Climate Research Center, said plans to strengthen Russia’s monitoring capability were on hold. “The instruments that were supposed to come out this year have stopped,” she said, as her colleagues’ travel plans were canceled. The US government has not issued a clear directive on interaction with Russian institutions, contrary to the European stance. A State Department spokesman told Reuters: “We do not hold the Russian people accountable. [for the conflict]”and they believe that a continued direct commitment to the Russian people is necessary – including in the fields of science and technology.” SCIENCE AS A SPECIFIC DAMAGE Projects under the state budget of the Russian Science Foundation for 2021, amounting to 22.9 billion rubles ($ 213 million) were based on collaborations with India, China, Japan, France, Austria and Germany, among others. A spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. European scientists have helped build Russian research sites, including the neutron reactor and ion accelerator near St. Petersburg, said Martin Sandhop, co-ordinator of the EU-funded effort called CremlinPlus. The facility will help advance research in areas such as high energy physics, biochemistry and materials science. But plans to extend the € 25 million project have now been suspended and the Sandhop team is redirecting experts and equipment to the European institutions. The Cremlin neutron detectors needed for the programmed reactor, for example, are now going to a facility in Lund, Sweden. Even if Russia manages to complete the expansion projects, it is not clear how valuable the project will be without the suite of tools in Western data analysis institutions. Efim Khazanov, a physicist at the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod, near Moscow, said not having access to European equipment would damage his work by using a high-energy laser to study subjects such as the structure of space-time in space, which could expands understanding of the universe. Khazanov was among thousands of Russian scientists who signed an open letter published in the independent online scientific publication Troitskiy Variant, saying Russia had been “condemned to international isolation” by invading Ukraine. Many Russian scientists have also fled the country, said Alexander Sergeyev, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to the state-run Interfax news agency. The letter of protest was temporarily removed from the site after Russia passed a law on March 4 criminalizing “fake news” in the campaign in Ukraine. That day, a letter was published on the state website of the Russian Union of Rectors in support of the Russian invasion and was signed by more than 300 top scientists, who have since been excluded from …
