Managing Cold Environments
- Management involves balancing the environment with economic demands
- The are 3 approaches:
- Prevention
- Reaction
- Adaptation
- Prevention
- Where an attempt is made to prevent a harmful event from happening
- Complete conservation of an area or limited scientific research
- Restrictions on tourism or resource exploitation
- Legal prevention or protection of an area (e.g. Antarctica) through international agreements, national governments, non-government organisations (NGOs), and technology
- Reaction
- Where there is a rapid response to an event once it has happened
- Introducing temporary fishing quotas to allow a particular fish stock to recover
- Cleaning up of an oil spill
- The Alaskan government provides emergency food supplies to feed 40,000 people for 7 days after a natural disaster cuts people off from regular supplies
- Offsetting carbon emissions to reduce global warming
- Ability to monitor and react to impacts - limiting the numbers of tourists to certain areas
- Clean and disinfect footwear of tourists to Antarctica in an effort to prevent invasive flora to the continent
- Adaptation
- Learning from and adapting to changes in the environment
- Identifying the needs of the indigenous communities without preventing access to their native hunting grounds and maintain cultural heritage
- Working practices are adapted - some employees take warming-up breaks to prevent frostbite and hypothermia
- Calorie intake has to be increased to cope with extreme temperatures and keep healthy
- Either increasing or decreasing protection of areas as necessary
- Using technology to help prevent further melting of the permafrost by buildings and roads, for example:
- Parts of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline are raised on stilts to prevent permafrost melt and creating unstable ground
- Homes are raised on stilts to prevent their heat from melting the permafrost (which can cause the land to sink and subside)
- To avoid damage to the permafrost, allow access and prevent freezing, domestic pipes are above ground
- Reducing heating costs through triple glazed homes and geothermal power
- Alaskan roads are built on 1-2-metre-thick gravel pads that stop heat transferring from vehicles to the soil beneath which would cause permafrost to melt and roads to crack
