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The northernmost town in the world, Ny-Ålesund, has for more than 30 years hosted the UK’s Arctic Research Station – the nation’s only permanent infrastructure at the Earth’s northern pole.
Located on the Norwegian island of Svalbard – one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth – the station acts as a base for UK scientists studying the Arctic’s ice, ecosystems and atmosphere.
On 7 February, Carbon Brief was invited to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the UK’s national polar research institute in Cambridge, to hear more about what life is like for UK scientists living in the Arctic Circle.
BAS’s Arctic Day also offered a chance to hear about how researchers are working to understand the complex impacts of climate change on the land’s most northern edge.
UK Arctic base
Formerly a mining town, Ny-Ålesund now hosts Arctic research stations for a range of countries including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK.
It is accessible via a flight on a 14-seater plane that leaves four times a week from Longyearbyen, the largest town in Svalbard.
Speaking at BAS’s Arctic Day, the institute’s Arctic operations manager Iain Rudkin explained that the town is famous for being the starting point for a number of “crazy” Arctic expeditions.
This includes the expeditions of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first man to successfully navigate the treacherous Northwest Passage through the Arctic to North America by boat in 1905.
The UK’s Arctic Research Station was built in 1991. It consists of seven bedrooms, three laboratories, a sitting room, an office and storage space. The station can be explored room by room using this 3D virtual tour tool.
According to station lab manager Guy Hillyard, the labs consist of a general space, a microscopic lab and a wet lab suitable for processing dirty soils and sediments.
The station also has an annex for drying mosses and soils, freezers at temperatures from -18 to -25C for storing ice cores and separate freezers for storing frozen sediment, he added.
Until recently, Ny-Ålesund was a town of “radio silence”, meaning there was no wifi, bluetooth or other kinds of internet access. However, last year, a decision was made to install a 4G mast.
Although many living at Ny-Ålesund appreciated the radio silence, the decision was made to make it easier for people out in the field to call for help if in danger and to allow scientists to use scientific equipment that communicates via the internet, Rudkin said.
Algae, AI and invisible ecosystems
BAS’s Arctic Day saw a number of UK-based scientists briefly explain the purposes of their research at Ny-Ålesund in the past and coming few months.
Dr Jaz Millar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, travelled to Ny-Ålesund in July 2023 as part of their research into how climate change could be affecting algal blooms on glaciers, which are vast rivers of frozen ice.
The algae that Millar studies is dark purple, meaning it lowers the “albedo” on the surface of glaciers. Albedo is a term for describing the proportion of sunlight that is reflected away from a surface, with bright white having a high albedo and dark colours having a low albedo.
When the albedo on the glacier’s surface is lowered, it absorbs more sunlight. This causes it to melt faster.
It is possible that presence of meltwater induces the growth of more algae – potentially representing a self-reinforcing “worrying positive feedback loop”, Millar explained.
Around Ny-Ålesund, Millar’s team visited three glaciers. They studied algal growth with a range of techniques, including bringing microscopes directly into their field sites and taking ice samples.
Millar’s research has not yet been published, but the results suggest that the relationship between glacier melt and algal bloom growth may be more complex than just a linear positive feedback loop.
Elsewhere, Prof Kate Hendry, a chemical oceanographer at BAS, explained more about her research into how the melting of glaciers could be altering the flow of key nutrients into coastal waters – eventually impacting marine ecosystems.
She explained that glacier meltwater typically contains nutrients that are needed by diatoms – single-cell algae that act as food for tiny marine creatures called zooplankton – which in turn support a wide range of fish, bird and mammal species, including whales. These nutrients include iron nitrate and silicic acid.
As glaciers melt at an increasingly rapid rate because of climate change, this may impact the growth of diatoms – in turn affecting species higher up the food chain, she said.
To study this, Hendry’s team visited Ny-Ålesund in 2023 to collect more than 1,000 samples from glaciers, the ocean and sediments. Her team will return this year to look further at how the availability of iron and silicon in fjord environments could be affected by climate change.
At the sidelines of the presentations, Carbon Brief spoke to Martin Rogers, a machine-learning scientist at BAS, about his research using AI to map changes to Arctic sea ice in higher resolution than is currently available.
The AI tool can search through different types of satellite imagery, offering scientists the highest-resolution image available when considering factors such as cloud cover, which can obscure views of the sea ice, he explained.
In the future, this tool could be used to help scientists understand in greater detail the extent to which sea ice is declining because of climate change, he added:
“The big question is about the decline in sea ice extent. With this product, you can get the sea ice extent in high fidelity. Then you’ve got more precise information about how the sea ice extent is changing between years.”
Finally, the conference heard from Laura Molares Moncayo, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum and Queen Mary University of London.
Her research is centred around the question of whether the Arctic’s atmosphere could be supporting an ecosystem that is invisible to the human eye.
For decades, researchers assumed that glaciers were devoid of complex lifeforms, she explained. However, research has revealed that they actually support a vast array of microorganisms, which are well adapted for harsh, frozen environments.
How did these microorganisms find their way into glaciers?
Glaciers grow by receiving rain and snow from the atmosphere. In fact, glaciers could be considered a “condensed version of the atmosphere”, Molares Moncayo explained.
It is possible, she continued, that the microorganisms found in glaciers may have fallen from the atmosphere. Such microorganisms would, in theory, already possess the adaptations required to survive the tough conditions of the Arctic air.
In a week’s time, she will travel to Ny-Ålesund to try to establish whether the Arctic atmosphere is home to an invisible ecosystem of microorganisms.
To do this, she will use a range of equipment, including dry air samplers, which collect any solid particles present in air into a filter.
She will then use DNA sequencing techniques to identify which microorganisms are present in her air samples. She will also study the microorganisms’ functional genes, which will offer clues into whether the microorganisms are interacting with each other when still in the air.
The post Ny-Ålesund: How UK scientists are studying climate change in the Arctic appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Ny-Ålesund: How UK scientists are studying climate change in the Arctic
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year