Two thirds of Russia's territory is covered by permafrost, perennial ice. Major cities such as Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Yakutsk are located in and above the Arctic Circle, along with thousands of kilometres of railways, including one of the longest in the world, the Baikal-Amur Main Line.
About 75 per cent of Russia's oil and 80 per cent of its gas are produced here, and plans are in the work to boost extraction.
Energy resources, however, are not the only thing drawing attention. Some scientists, officials, and members of Russia’s parliament are pinning their hopes on agriculture made possible by the thawing permafrost.
This is where the myth of Siberian bananas and the idea of growing wheat in the Arctic come from, where Russia, despite potential trillions in losses, has stalled its efforts to adapt to melting ice.
Permafrost is soil that remains consistently at 0°C or below. The average permafrost thaw in Russia reached 45 cm in depth in 1996, rising to 70 cm in 2023. This means that the soil on which buildings, roads, and infrastructure stand are changing.
As environmental journalist Rufina Garipova explains in Novaya Gazeta, 40-80 per cent of buildings in Arctic cities have become deformed, as have thousands of kilometres of oil pipelines.
Several episodes of thawing and resulting disasters have already been reported, requiring extensive scientific research on permafrost and the adoption of adaptation measures. A monitoring network is essential, as the traits of ice vary even from one building to another.
Such a network was first discussed in Russia in 2021, with plans to establish it after 2024. Similarly, a law on permafrost protection was also proposed to incentivise management companies, building and road owners, and industrialists to preserve it, and thus reduce their impact on frozen land.
The fact is that global warming is exacerbated by leaks in urban water and sewerage systems, which is easy to envisage. Like ordinary ice, which melts on contact with water, permafrost follows a similar process.
The potential loss of buildings, roads, and infrastructure built on permafrost has already been assessed, and the authorities have recognised the need to prevent these risks.
Unlike the construction and mining sectors, where new design solutions are needed, agriculture is often perceived as a sector that could benefit from climate change, and rising temperatures in northern regions.
Some 15-20 years ago, as the climate change debate kicked off in Russia, the idea that bananas could soon be grown in Siberia appeared. Individual scientific studies fuelled interest in the topic, sparking speculation about how Russia's polar regions could become the country's breadbasket.
“Climate change could make life easier for people: winters will become less harsh, and the soil, becoming more suitable for agriculture, will produce higher yields,” wrote scientists from the Krasnoyarsk-based Sukachev Institute of Forest of the Russian Academy of Sciences in their climate forecast for 2080.
“As a result, the regions of Eastern Siberia, the Far East, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic could become more attractive places to live than the south, where heat and drought will prevail," they explained.
With perennial ice retreating, the climate of the Arctic regions will resemble that of the Volga region, the experts promised.
In 2020, Canadian scientists discovered the benefits of warming at high latitudes, resulting in the planet's agricultural land area increasing by almost a third in the next 50 to 100 years, thanks in part to promising new lands in northern Canada and Russia.
Russia thus would become a "climate change beneficiary”.
The idea of developing agriculture in Siberia and the Far East was revisited in the 2024 pamphlet The Economic Effects of Climate Change in Russia, drafted and published by the Institute for the Economics of Natural Resources and Climate Change, with the support of billionaire Andrey Melnichenko's charitable foundation.
The authors believe that, with a one-degree increase in temperature, Russia's GDP could rise by more than a trillion roubles (US$ 12.3 billion) with the main benefits in agriculture and forestry, totalling 567 billion roubles (US$ 7 billion).
All these and other simplified examples of interpreting scientific research lead to cognitive distortions in perception of reality, with an artificial tendency towards optimism that creates a rosy picture, in which Siberia is seen as a "new Volga region”, while problems such as flooding and land degradation remain unresolved.
A lot depends on how information is presented. Media and reports favour vivid images of "bananas in Siberia" and depict "Russia as the main beneficiary”, slogans that are easy to remember, while complex scientific details, warnings, and risk calculations are often overlooked.
Case in point. In February 2026, the magazine Argumenty i Fakty published an article titled "How Bananas are grown in Siberia”, which actually focused on growing a limited number of bananas in greenhouses.
Shortly before that, in 2025, Andrei Platonov, head of the nonprofit organisation Subtropics of Russia, told the Greenhouse Industry of Russia forum that a banana and lemon farming experiment would begin in Siberia.
When Russians read articles like this, the details are ignored, giving way to the idea that global warming will allow the development of agriculture in the Arctic. Maybe not bananas, but wheat will be possible.
This opinion is typical of those who have never visited the polar regions, who have never observed what Arctic vegetation and landscapes look like on frozen ground.
The idea that existing climate zones will simply shift northward assumes uniform global warming and stable consequences. In reality, temperature increases are uneven (the Arctic is warming four times faster than the tropics) and their consequences are unpredictable, as British climate change researcher Ben Shread-Hewitt put it, so any new climate in Siberia will be inherently unstable.
Temperatures are not the only obstacle to agricultural development in Siberia. The average annual temperature increase is insufficient for Siberia to become Russia's agricultural centre, explained Igor Vakhrushev, a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Geography, Geoecology, and Tourism, at the Vernadsky Crimean Federal University.
According to the scientist, the lands freed from permafrost will be difficult to exploit because they are becoming waterlogged, and Siberian soil is much poorer than southern "black soils" since it lacks a fertile layer and humus.
“Agricultural development in the polar regions will require the creation of new infrastructure and road networks, awareness campaigns, and other measures, which will be even costlier than overcoming agricultural problems in southern Russia due, for example, to global warming," Vakhrushev warns.
This conclusion confirms what CarbonLab CEO Mikhail Julkin, one of Russia's foremost experts on climate policy and carbon regulation, noted, namely that Russia must modernise its economic system to benefit from global warming.
In 2024, the monograph Permafrost Monitoring was published, completing the preparatory phase for the start of work on physically establishing new observation points on "eternal ice”.
The next step is to create detailed permafrost maps to inform the design of infrastructure and mining facilities, but the available material is still insufficient to assess the local bearing capacity of the soils.
The permafrost situation, like other climate change-related issues, highlights the ineffectiveness of Russia's public administration system. Each prime minister, relevant ministry, and scientific body is responsible for specific areas of work, while transforming the natural system requires interdisciplinary and inter-ministerial cooperation.
And if an inter-ministerial working group were to be created in Russia on any given issue, its sole purpose would be to drown the decision-making process in bureaucratic disputes.
Since Stalin’s time, Russia has dreamt of a "banana empire" in Siberia, an image of the icy world dominated from the top, one that is melting not to irrigate the enchanted gardens of a Russian paradise, but to dissolve the future of the world's largest country, which has always pursued only its own illusions.
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