Subarctic - Economy

Economy

Except for a few parts of Europe where the winters are relatively mild due to prevailing wind patterns, subarctic regions were not explored until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even then, the difficulty of transportation ensured that few settlements (most of them created for mining) lasted long—the ghost towns of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and increasingly Siberia illustrate this.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, which skirts the edge of the region, provided a major boost to Russian settlement in the subarctic, as did the intensive industrialisation under Joseph Stalin that relied on the enormous mineral resources of the Central Siberian Plateau. Today, many towns in subarctic Russia are declining precipitously as former mines close. In Canada, after the early minerals run out, development stalled until hydroelectric development occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Hydro-Québec in particular has carried out many remarkable engineering works in regions of near-continuous permafrost, but these have never supported a significant population and have mainly served densely populated southern Québec.

Tourism in recent years has become a major source of revenue for most countries of the subarctic due to the beautiful, generally glacial, landscapes so characteristic of the region. Most areas in the subarctic are among the most expensive places in the world to visit, both due to high costs of living and extreme difficulties of transport. Nonetheless, the great opportunities for outdoor recreation lure an ever-increasing number of travellers. At the same time, the older industries of the subarctic (fishing, mining, hydroelectric power) are being threatened both by environmental opposition and overfishing leading to depleted stocks of commercially important species.