Aarrestad, a terrestrial researcher with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim, was involved in an environmental monitoring and assessment program along the Norwegian, Finnish and Russian border region from 2003 to 2006. The border region receives significant amounts of sulfur dioxide and heavy metal deposits because of emissions from smelters in northwest Russia that are carried by the wind.
The monitoring program was supported by the three governments’ research funding institutes to look at the state of ecosystems in the region because smelters in Nikel, Russia had been renovated and governments wanted to know whether changes in industrial practice were yielding positive environmental results.
Scientists studied species diversity and looked at concentrations of nickel and copper in soil, vegetation and small animals. They then compared results with data from the 1990s and found that there had, indeed, been positive change.
Though levels of heavy metals were still high around Nikel and surrounding areas, they were lower than they had been a decade earlier. Data also showed that lichens and mosses, which are the species most severely affected by sulfer dioxide and heavy metal deposits, were starting to return to areas in the vicinity of the smelters where they had previously been wiped out.
The results were encouraging, but also heralded bad news.
“Then the interest dropped and so there hasn’t been any new analyzing since 2006,” Aarrestad says.
Heavy metal concentrations may be continuing to decrease in the soil and vegetation of the border region, but there’s also a chance that conditions have worsened in the last seven years. In order to make sure efforts to reduce emissions from Nikel’s industrial region are on the right track, soil and vegetation monitoring needs to be done at least every five years, Aarrestad says. But no research team has received funding for such work.
Aarrestad is not the only researcher to point to the need for increased environmental monitoring. This week, he joined about 20 other environmental scientists from across Norway, Finland and Russia at a workshop in Svanhovd, Norway to discuss the state of pollution and climate change research in the Barents region and to identify areas where further work is needed.
Lars Ola Nilsson, a soil and environment scientist at Bioforsk in Svanhovd who organized the workshop, says environmental monitoring is particularly important now because climate change is causing Arctic ecosystems to change faster than ever before.
Extensive research has shown that Arctic temperatures are increasing more quickly than anywhere else in the world. Northern regions are becoming lusher and this plant life has the potential to release elements from the soil, including large stores of carbon which contribute to greenhouse gases.
And if there are heavy metals in the soil as well, these could also have negative impacts on the environment, Nilsson says.
“I think temperature rise will make heavy metals in the soil more available so they will come out in the plants and that may be a health risk,” he told the BarentsObserver.
But without proper monitoring, the concentrations of these metals and their potential implications cannot be fully understood – a concept worrying to some, including Aarrestad.
The three-day workshop wraps up Wednesday afternoon.
