Winter temperatures in Russia have risen by an average of 3 degrees Celsius over the past half-century, a leading climate expert told state media on Monday.
“It’s a little more in the Arctic and a little less in the south of Russia,” Alexei Kokorin, a climate expert at the Nature and People Foundation, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
Kokorin, who has worked with organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said authorities in Russia began observing the upward temperature trend in 1976.
Moscow provided a stark example, with temperatures hitting 3.5 degrees Celsius (38.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday morning — breaking a more than century-old daily record. Meanwhile, 2024 saw the warmest temperatures recorded in 170 years along Lake Baikal, where ice cover had yet to form as of mid-January.
Russia has been warming at more than twice the global average since 1976, with 2024 marking the hottest year ever recorded globally. Scientists warn that the human-induced climate crisis raises the risk of harvest failures, forced migration, mass extinction of species and ecosystem collapse.
Russia is already grappling with more frequent droughts, floods, heatwaves and the rapid thawing of permafrost across its diverse climatic zones, which range from subtropical to Arctic.
Environmental officials in Russia have warned that unchecked climate change could trigger epidemics and widespread hunger.
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