Arild Olsen has a clear memory of his first steps on Longyearbyen’s snow two decades ago. “I remember the crisp sound because it was so dry, it was like moving on glass,” says Olsen, who is now the town’s mayor. “But I haven't heard that sound for years.”
The climate crisis is changing the snow and reshaping life in Longyearbyen, a town of 2,500 on the Svalbard archipelago, which lies deep inside the Arctic Circle halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It’s the world’s northernmost permanently-inhabited town. It’s also the fastest-warming.
Technically classified as an Arctic desert, Svalbard is becoming wetter and warmer. The summer of 2020 was one of the hottest recorded, with temperatures regularly in the 20s. “That's extremely high in the Arctic,” says Olsen. It wasn’t a blip. Average temperatures have risen by around 4 degrees Celsius since 1971 and are projected to increase by 10 degrees Celsius by 2100.
To live here is to have a front row seat to the climate crisis. “Fish, whales, seals are shifting. Bird life is changing dramatically… We see avalanches, buildings losing their footing. You name it, we have,” says Kim Holmén, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute who’s studied Svalbard for the last three decades.
But it’s not a place of despair. For the last three years, Olsen has been developing an ambitious plan to transform Longyearbyen into a zero emissions town. He wants to make it a model for both tackling climate change as well as adapting to the changes already locked in. “We can become an inspiration,” he says. “A lighthouse for bigger push forward in the fight against climate change.”
It won’t be straightforward. Longyearbyen is a town built by coal. Coal is what brought Olsen, a former miner, to Svalbard. It’s what started his journey into politics, when he became union leader. And it’s what catalysed his concern about climate change, as he began to question the logic of basing a whole economy on a polluting, dwindling resource.
“We couldn’t find a dumber way to produce electricity than coal,” he says. It’s emissions-intensive and extremely costly for a small community. It’s also vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate. When temperatures pushed above 21 degrees Celsius last summer, melting water from a glacier flooded the only active Norwegian-operated mine on Svalbard causing extensive damage and forcing it to close.
Olsen, who wants to wean Longyearbyen off coal as fast as possible, is bubbling with ideas for its energy transformation. The trick, he says, is working out how to combine the different types of technology. He believes a mix of wind and solar could power the town and also produce emissions-free green hydrogen, which can be stored.
The idea of solar is perhaps surprising for a town famed for its “dark season” – nearly three months from November to late January when the Sun never lifts above the horizon and the town is blanketed in darkness. But this climate offers advantages. Not only are there months when the Sun never sets, but the snow provides a reflective surface which can increase power output and the cold increases the efficiency of solar panels.
Falling costs are making solar more competitive for polar regions, says Thomas Thiis, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who co-authored a recent study on polar solar, which included trials on a small solar array outside Longyearbyen.
There are still challenges. Strong winds mean rocks and pebbles sometimes smash into the panels and snowdrifts can cause mechanical damage. But there are ways to adapt. “None of these issues are complete turn-offs,” says Thiis. “This is about finding the right engineering solution.”
The town’s old coal plant, which is increasingly expensive to run, is slated to be closed within the next two to five years and the Norwegian government announced in January that it was seeking a new energy solution for Longyearbyen. It warned that gas or biopellets might be needed in the interim before renewables are phased in.
“We are talking about transforming the energy source for a whole city,” Olsen says. That takes time, but he believes the pace of action will only accelerate as renewables continue to get cheaper.
One area of transformation that is happening more quickly is housing. Recent avalanches, linked to climate change, have revealed the precariousness of a city laid out at the foot of mountains. Warmer temperatures have also caused a deeper thaw in the permafrost, which has long provided the frozen foundations for the town. Buildings, traditionally constructed with wooden piles driven into the permafrost, have started sinking and their foundations have rotted. “The houses are moving, the roads are moving, everything is moving,” Olsen says.
In the wake of the avalanches, Statsbygg, the Norwegian body that looks after state-owned buildings, has built around 60 new climate-adapted homes anchored by steel poles sunk through the permafrost and deep into the mountain rock. “We have never built like that before,” says Inger-Johanne Tollaas, a Statsbygg project leader who oversaw construction.
The houses were built to Passivhaus standards designed and insulated to make them as low energy and heat-efficient as possible. They also took pains to preserve plants, flowers and shrubs during construction. This meant slicing off the top layer of earth at the site to store elsewhere, before returning it post-construction, laying it back down like a living carpet.
“You need to plan the city that people want to live in,” says Olsen. That means comfortable houses and green spaces, but it also involves other aspects such as tackling the big increase of cars in the town. Olsen wants to incentivize car sharing between families, as well as encouraging more walking and cycling.
He’s looking at waste, too. Much of the town’s waste is currently shipped 1,400km back to the mainland. “It’s super stupid,” says Olsen. “We send plastic up to Longyearbyen [from the mainland] and then we throw it away as garbage and we ship it back down again.” It’s often far cheaper to ship new materials in than to repurpose or recycle what they have.
“Instead of throwing everything away, we are trying to look at [waste] as a resource that can be reused,” he says. Olsen hopes a new reuse centre, where people can drop off unwanted items or find items they need among those others have left, will be the first step towards creating a circular economy in Longyearbyen.
Olsen knows that even if Longyearbyen can reach its zero emissions goal and transform its economy, the actions of this tiny Arctic town are a drop in the ocean when it comes to tackling the barrelling climate crisis. But that isn’t the point, he says. “No society, big or small, has the luxury to resign, to say: ‘it's too complex’, ‘we can't do it’ or ‘we're too small’. It doesn't add up,” he says. “Everybody needs to do something. We can do something. And that will be part of the puzzle.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
