Wildfires and warm temperatures aren’t the sort of events you’d reasonably associate with the Arctic tundra; but this is a complex landscape and these are critical times. And, at the suggestion of scientists who position that this northernmost region is now emitting more carbon than it once stored, the changes the Arctic is going through grow more complex by the day.

In what the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has called a “dramatic transformation” of the Arctic, frequent wildfires and warming temperatures have seen the region – an area which has been storing carbon in frozen soil for millennia – become a major source of carbon emission into the atmosphere.

It has been documented as such in the NOAA’s 2024 Arctic Report Card that climatic shifts are now forcing plants, wildlife, and the people that depend on them to rapidly adapt to a warmer, wetter, and “less certain world around them.”

When including the impact of increased wildfire activity in the region, the region has now shifted from storing carbon in the soil to becoming a carbon dioxide source. Over the last 20 years, circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tonnes of carbon a year.

“Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts,” said NOAA administrator, Rick Spinrad Ph.D. “This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution.”

With contributions from 97 scientists from 11 countries, new research published in the Arctic Report Card, reveals record-setting observations that underlie ongoing changes emerging in the Arctic, including not only high air temperatures and wildfires but declines of large inland caribou herds and increasing precipitation.

In fact, populations of migratory Arctic tundra caribou have declined by some 65% over the last two or three decades, while changes in winter snowfall alongside a growing human footprint is dramatically altering their distribution, movements, survival, and productivity. 

“This year’s report demonstrates the urgent need for adaptation as climate conditions quickly change,” said Twila Moon, lead editor of the Arctic Report Card and deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. “Indigenous knowledge and community-led research programmes can inform successful responses to rapid Arctic changes.”

Surface air temperatures across the Arctic tundra have now ranked the second-warmest since 1900, peaking in recent years in autumn 2023 and summer 2024 when temperatures ranked the second and third warmest respectively. As well as this, summer 2024 was also the wettest on record for the Arctic.

In the ocean, and in September 2024, the extent of Arctic sea ice was the sixth lowest in the 45 year satellite record. Arctic Ocean regions that were ice-free in August have been warming at a rate of 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1982, while most of the shallow seas that ring the Arctic Ocean have seen temperatures increase. For the time being, the report states that ice seal populations remain healthy in the Pacific Arctic, though their diets are shifting from Arctic cod to saffron cod with warming waters.

On land, and this year’s report sees a similar image developing. Alaskan permafrost are reportedly the second warmest on record. The impact that this has on the populations of migratory caribou is projected to magnify over the next 25 to 75 years, requiring – the NOAA states – a shared knowledge between scientists and Indigenous communities for management strategies, all the while ice cover continues to retreat. In fact, tundra greenness, a measure of expanding shrub cover due to warming temperatures, ranked the second highest in the 25-year satellite record.

“Many of the Arctic’s vital signs that we track are either setting or flirting with record-high or record-low values nearly every year,” said Gerald Fros, senior scientist with Alaska Biological Research Inc and veteran Arctic Report Card author.

“This is an indication that recent extreme years are the result of long-term, persistent changes, and not the result of variability in the climate system.”  

Earlier this month, scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder issued perhaps our starkest warning yet that the Arctic was in trouble, indicating that the Arctic Ocean could have its first ice-free day as soon as 2027. 

As the climate warms from increasing greenhouse gas emissions, sea ice in the Arctic has been melting at an “unprecedented speed” of more than 12% each decade. The report warns that at such a rate, it is inevitable that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free within the next 20 years.

The environmental NGO, Greenpeace went lengths to shine a spotlight on the crisis being faced in the Arctic right now with a campaign that illustrated the rate of ice cover retreat through a series of photographs taken only a matter of a few decades apart. A climate change ‘before and after’, the images depicted regions of the Arctic where once loomed ice walls, now bare of any ice cover at all, referring to the glacial structures of yesteryear as ‘ghosts of the Arctic.’ 

“The Arctic is our sentinel – it’s where the climate and ocean crisis converge and where the impacts of these crises are seen first and felt most keenly,” said the Greenpeace campaign’s photographer, Christian Åslund.

The Arctic region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, and signs that the region is suffering severely from the climate crisis are accelerating. When including the impact of increased wildfire activity, the Arctic tundra region has now shifted from storing carbon in the soil to becoming a carbon source for the atmosphere. Since 2003, circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tonnes of carbon each year. 

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