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Articles by Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian

Patrick Greenfield is a biodiversity and environment reporter for the Guardian and the Observer.

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A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests, and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

More than 30 percent of the region was a net source of CO2, according to the analysis, rising to 40 percent when emissions from wildfires were included. By using monitoring data from 200 study sites between 1990 and 2020, the research demonstrates how the Arctic’s boreal forests, wetlands, and tundra are being transformed by rapid warming.

“It is the first time that we’re seeing this shift at such a large scale, cumulatively acros... Read more

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