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\"This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they choose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, which has treated ownership structure as a constant across time and space and has presumed that mineral-rich countries are incapable of either building or sustaining strong institutions - particularly fiscal regimes. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions. Their respective developmental trajectories since independence demonstrate not only that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy but also that this variation helps to explain the divergence in their subsequent fiscal regimes\"--Provided by publisher.

The year 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the official inauguration of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a free association of sovereign states comprised of Russia and 11 other republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (The CIS--Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine; the South Caucasus--Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia plus disconnected Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and Central Asia--Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Although this loose association of states may not exist as a fixed-entity on the globe, it is believed that this bloc of countries will continue to build upon the various separate regions in the former Soviet space in the coming decade. Despite major differences country-to-country, groups within each state share many common economic, political, and cultural characteristics, which many hope will fade with the passing of those generations that remember the common state. In this context, the Russian Federation holds a unique position in the Euro-Pacific area. Separate, distinct, but still bordering these regions and related to all of them to differing degrees, in the 2010s Russia will step up efforts to become an independent center of gravity in Northern Eurasia. Leaning on its CIS allies and partners, Moscow is willing to fortify its stance vis-à-vis its geopolitical competitors--the European Union in the west, and China in the east. Nevertheless, the combination of factors that determined the plunge in the economy of the CIS since the second quarter of 2015 persists today. These factors included the sharp fall in commodities prices, restrictions on access to international capital markets due to sanctions against Russia and a deceleration in China, which is the region's main trading partner. Although economic conditions in most of the CIS economies are challenging, differences in growth dynamics persist. Oil and gas exporting countries, namely Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan, are seeing economic conditions deteriorating rapidly because of the sharp fall in energy prices. Meanwhile, most of the labor-exporting countries (Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Tajikistan) are seeing the deterioration in growth rates, mainly due to strong production in the agricultural sector and, in some cases, increased activity in the extractive sector. This book provides a regional analysis, as well as country scan, of the CIS regional block economies. We will examine their history since the breakup of the formal Soviet Union and the formation of the CIS bloc, including creation of regional agreements such as the CIS Free Trade Area and the Eurasian Economic Union, a single economic market which now represents more than 180 million people. As a whole, our text attempts to better understand current, and future, prospects for economic growth in the region, as well as their individual national challenges.

Glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking rapidly, altering regional hydrology 1 , raising global sea level 2 and elevating natural hazards 3 . Yet, owing to the scarcity of constrained mass loss observations, glacier evolution during the satellite era is known only partially, as a geographic and temporal patchwork 4 , 5 . Here we reveal the accelerated, albeit contrasting, patterns of glacier mass loss during the early twenty-first century. Using largely untapped satellite archives, we chart surface elevation changes at a high spatiotemporal resolution over all of Earth’s glaciers. We extensively validate our estimates against independent, high-precision measurements and present a globally complete and consistent estimate of glacier mass change. We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise 6 . We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise. Particularly, thinning rates of glaciers outside ice sheet peripheries doubled over the past two decades. Glaciers currently lose more mass, and at similar or larger acceleration rates, than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets taken separately 7 – 9 . By uncovering the patterns of mass change in many regions, we find contrasting glacier fluctuations that agree with the decadal variability in precipitation and temperature. These include a North Atlantic anomaly of decelerated mass loss, a strongly accelerated loss from northwestern American glaciers, and the apparent end of the Karakoram anomaly of mass gain 10 . We anticipate our highly resolved estimates to advance the understanding of drivers that govern the distribution of glacier change, and to extend our capabilities of predicting these changes at all scales. Predictions robustly benchmarked against observations are critically needed to design adaptive policies for the local- and regional-scale management of water resources and cryospheric risks, as well as for the global-scale mitigation of sea-level rise. Analysis of satellite stereo imagery uncovers two decades of mass change for all of Earth’s glaciers, revealing accelerated glacier shrinkage and regionally contrasting changes consistent with decadal climate variability.

Societal upheaval occurred across Eurasia in the sixth and seventh centuries. Tree-ring reconstructions suggest a period of pronounced cooling during this time associated with several volcanic eruptions. Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role in societal reorganizations in Europe 1 , 2 and Asia 3 , 4 . In particular, the sixth century coincides with rising and falling civilizations 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , pandemics 7 , 8 , human migration and political turmoil 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . Our understanding of the magnitude and spatial extent as well as the possible causes and concurrences of climate change during this period is, however, still limited. Here we use tree-ring chronologies from the Russian Altai and European Alps to reconstruct summer temperatures over the past two millennia. We find an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling following a cluster of large volcanic eruptions in 536, 540 and 547  AD (ref.  14 ), which was probably sustained by ocean and sea-ice feedbacks 15 , 16 , as well as a solar minimum 17 . We thus identify the interval from 536 to about 660  AD as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Spanning most of the Northern Hemisphere, we suggest that this cold phase be considered as an additional environmental factor contributing to the establishment of the Justinian plague 7 , 8 , transformation of the eastern Roman Empire and collapse of the Sasanian Empire 1 , 2 , 5 , movements out of the Asian steppe and Arabian Peninsula 8 , 11 , 12 , spread of Slavic-speaking peoples 9 , 10 and political upheavals in China 13 .

Temporal genomic data hold great potential for studying evolutionary processes such as speciation. However, sampling across speciation events would, in many cases, require genomic time series that stretch well back into the Early Pleistocene subepoch. Although theoretical models suggest that DNA should survive on this timescale 1 , the oldest genomic data recovered so far are from a horse specimen dated to 780–560 thousand years ago 2 . Here we report the recovery of genome-wide data from three mammoth specimens dating to the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs, two of which are more than one million years old. We find that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene. One of these lineages gave rise to the woolly mammoth and the other represents a previously unrecognized lineage that was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America. Our analyses reveal that the Columbian mammoth of North America traces its ancestry to a Middle Pleistocene hybridization between these two lineages, with roughly equal admixture proportions. Finally, we show that the majority of protein-coding changes associated with cold adaptation in woolly mammoths were already present one million years ago. These findings highlight the potential of deep-time palaeogenomics to expand our understanding of speciation and long-term adaptive evolution. Siberian mammoth genomes from the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs reveal adaptive changes and a key hybridization event, highlighting the value of deep-time palaeogenomics for studies of speciation and long-term evolutionary trends.

Surges and glacier avalanches are expressions of glacier instability, and among the most dramatic phenomena in the mountain cryosphere. Until now, the catastrophic collapse of a glacier, combining the large volume of surges and mobility of ice avalanches, has been reported only for the 2002 130 × 106 m3 detachment of Kolka Glacier (Caucasus Mountains), which has been considered a globally singular event. Here, we report on the similar detachment of the entire lower parts of two adjacent glaciers in western Tibet in July and September 2016, leading to an unprecedented pair of giant low-angle ice avalanches with volumes of 68 ± 2 × 106 m3 and 83 ± 2 × 106 m3. On the basis of satellite remote sensing, numerical modelling and field investigations, we find that the twin collapses were caused by climate- and weather-driven external forcing, acting on specific polythermal and soft-bed glacier properties. These factors converged to produce surge-like enhancement of driving stresses and massively reduced basal friction connected to subglacial water and fine-grained bed lithology, to eventually exceed collapse thresholds in resisting forces of the tongues frozen to their bed. Our findings show that large catastrophic instabilities of low-angle glaciers can happen under rare circumstances without historical precedent.

Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago 1 , 2 . Here we present the genome of ‘Denisova 11’, a bone fragment from Denisova Cave (Russia) 3 and show that it comes from an individual who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The father, whose genome bears traces of Neanderthal ancestry, came from a population related to a later Denisovan found in the cave 4 – 6 . The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe 2 , 7 than to an earlier Neanderthal found in Denisova Cave 8 , suggesting that migrations of Neanderthals between eastern and western Eurasia occurred sometime after 120,000 years ago. The finding of a first-generation Neanderthal–Denisovan offspring among the small number of archaic specimens sequenced to date suggests that mixing between Late Pleistocene hominin groups was common when they met. Genomic evidence of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father suggests that mixing among different hominin groups may have more been frequent than previously appreciated.

Climate warming is expected to mobilize northern permafrost and peat organic carbon (PP-C), yet magnitudes and system specifics of even current releases are poorly constrained. While part of the PP-C will degrade at point of thaw to CO₂ and CH₄ to directly amplify global warming, another part will enter the fluvial network, potentially providing a window to observe large-scale PP-C remobilization patterns. Here, we employ a decade-long, high-temporal resolution record of 14C in dissolved and particulate organic carbon (DOC and POC, respectively) to deconvolute PP-C release in the large drainage basins of rivers across Siberia: Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and Kolyma. The 14C-constrained estimate of export specifically from PP-C corresponds to only 17 ± 8% of total fluvial organic carbon and serves as a benchmark for monitoring changes to fluvial PP-C remobilization in a warming Arctic. Whereas DOC was dominated by recent organic carbon and poorly traced PP-C (12 ± 8%), POC carried a much stronger signature of PP-C (63 ± 10%) and represents the best window to detect spatial and temporal dynamics of PP-C release. Distinct seasonal patterns suggest that while DOC primarily stems from gradual leaching of surface soils, POC reflects abrupt collapse of deeper deposits. Higher dissolved PP-C export by Ob and Yenisey aligns with discontinuous permafrost that facilitates leaching, whereas higher particulate PP-C export by Lena and Kolyma likely echoes the thermokarst-induced collapse of Pleistocene deposits. Quantitative 14C-based fingerprinting of fluvial organic carbon thus provides an opportunity to elucidate large-scale dynamics of PP-C remobilization in response to Arctic warming.

Karst aquifers are one of the main potable water sources worldwide. Although the exact global karst water utilisation figures cannot be provided, this study represents an attempt to make an upgraded assessment of earlier and often circulated data. The main objective of the undertaken analysis is not only to provide an assessment of the utilisation of current karst aquifers, but also to estimate possible trends under various impact factors such as population growth or climate changes. In > 140 countries, different types of karstified rocks crop out over some 19.3 × 106 km2, covering > 14% of ice-free land. The main ‘karst countries’, those with > 1 × 106 km2 of karst surface are Russia, USA, China and Canada, while among those with > 80% of the territories covered by karst are Jamaica, Cuba, Montenegro and several others. In contrast, in a quarter of the total number of countries, karstic rocks are either totally absent or have a minor extension, meaning that no karst water sources can be developed. Although the precise number of total karst water consumers cannot be defined, it was assessed in 2016 at approximately 678 million or 9.2% of the world’s population, which is twice less than what was previously estimated in some of the reports. With a total estimated withdrawal of 127 km3/year, karst aquifers are contributing to the total global groundwater withdrawal by about 13%. However, only around 4% of the estimated average global annually renewable karstic groundwater is currently utilised, of which < 1% is for drinking purposes. Although often problematic because of unstable discharge regimes and high vulnerability to pollution, karst groundwater represents the main source of potable water supply in many countries and regions. Nevertheless, engineering solutions are often required to ensure a sustainable water supply and prevent negative consequences of groundwater over-extraction.

We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neanderthal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half-siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high-quality Neanderthal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans. A complete genome sequence is presented of a female Neanderthal from Siberia, providing information about interbreeding between close relatives and uncovering gene flow events among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, as well as establishing substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Genome sequence of Neanderthal woman Recent excavations in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia have yielded a wealth of hominin fossils from a site that has been occupied for perhaps 250,000 years or more. Now a high-quality genome sequence has been determined from a circa 50,000-year-old toe bone — a proximal toe phalanx — excavated from the east gallery of Denisova Cave in 2010. The sequence is that of a Neanderthal woman whose parents were closely related — perhaps half-siblings or uncle and niece. Such inbreeding was also common among her recent ancestors. Comparisons with other archaic and present-day human genomes reveal several gene-flow events among Neanderthals, the closely related Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. The high-quality Neanderthal genome also helps to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.