Geoenvironmental Factors of Resilience of Arctic Cities in the Cryolithozone: Theoretical Approaches to the Study

• Published in: Izvestiya Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk Seriya Geograficheskaya
• Main Authors: A. A. Medvedkov, А. А. Медведков
• Other Authors: The study was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project no. 18- 05-60088)., Исследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке РФФИ (проект № 18-05-60088).
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Russian
• Published: Izvestiya Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk. Seriya Geograficheskaya 2021
• Subjects: резистентность; Far North; urban settlements; extreme cities; permafrost landscapes; climate change; environmental indicators; planning horizons; resistance; Крайний Север; городские населенные пункты; экстремальные города; мерзлотные ландшафты; изменения климата; экологические индикаторы; горизонты планирования; Arctic; Climate change; permafrost; Крайн*
• Online Access: https://izvestia.igras.ru/jour/article/view/1412; https://doi.org/10.31857/S2587556621050071

Factors of the natural and geographical environment indirectly affecting the economic space structure, the cost of living, and the development conditions of any Arctic city in the cryolithozone are considered. Three groups of factors are identified based on modern ideas about the characteristic time of changes in various natural and environmental components, and taking into account the scale of transformational consequences: inert (territory biogeochemical specialization, nature of permafrost distribution for the next 25–30 years), relatively inert/poorly changing (territory dissection, direction, and speed of Earth’s crust vertical movements, permafrost iciness, thermal discomfort, biologically active ultraviolet radiation deficit, atmospheric pressure variability, the atmosphere self-purification potential) and dynamic (water supply, average annual temperature of permafrost at the base of the layer of annual fluctuations, capacity of the layer of seasonal freezing and thawing, runoff of suspended sediment, subject to the development of small or medium rivers’ water catchment, biological productivity of landscapes). These factors affect the weakening of the resilience of Arctic cities, and their importance is enhanced by rapid climate changes and changing intensity of anthropogenic load. To assess the impact of these factors on the Arctic cities development and comparison of their values in the dynamics of the proposed indicators—areal assessment of the thermodenudation processes prevalence, gully network density, runoff, frequency and duration of flooding, changes in indices of thermal comfort, number of endemic diseases and their dynamics, dynamics of population morbidity in conjunction with the calculated value of the air pollution potential, biological productivity of landscapes and tendencies of its change in relation to the dynamics of indicators of the structure of the underlying surface’s heat balance. These indicators can be a component of the developed index of Arctic cities’ resilience. The analyzed ...