The State Duma of the Russian Federation in the third and final reading adopted a law on the establishment of state monitoring of the state of permafrost.
"It is envisaged to introduce amendments to the legislation of the Russian Federation aimed at creating a state background monitoring of the state of permafrost on the basis of the state monitoring network of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring," the explanatory note to the document says.
Monitoring is planned to be implemented in two stages: in 2023, the development of appropriate methods and technologies will begin, and in 2024-2025, the system itself will be organized. In total, 140 monitoring stations are planned to be created by the end of 2025, which will prevent the occurrence of emergency situations in the residential sector and industrial zone.
According to the government, it will take 970 million rubles to create a monitoring network of Roshydromet this year and next, and 212 million rubles a year for maintenance. The money will be allocated under the Environmental Protection program.
According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, only over the past two to three decades, the permafrost temperature in different regions has increased by 0.5-2 degrees. This is especially noticeable in the Arctic.
According to some estimates, by 2050 approximately 70% of the infrastructure that is located on permafrost will be subject to deformations from its melting.
To date, the only project of centralized collection of permafrost data, including in Russia, is the global terrestrial permafrost network GTN-P, goarctic-ru notes.
Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished