Cold climate can negatively impact humans because people that live in freezing climates it is harder to collect food (if they are farmers or not). People limit their outdoor activities to warmer [parts of the day so it isn’t as cold as it would be. Sin some societies they sleep in family group in order to share body warmth at night due to the low temperatures that occur. Also many people that live in freezing climates drink alcohol in order to warm themselves. The alcohol increases blood flow to the body and provides the feeling of being warm. The results are only temporary and can actually speed up the heat loss from vital organs which can lead to as faster death from hypothermia.
4 ways in which humans have adapted to this stress is consuming large amounts of high calorie fatty foods which significantly increases the basal metabolic rate which results I the production of extra body heat. A cultural adaption would be how some society sleep in family group in order to keep warm. A short –term adaptation would be drinking alcohol to keep the warm feeling but that would only last as long as you drink and can actually cause more heat to dissipate from your body.
The benefits from studying this would know how to deal with extremely cold climates and what to do is someone develops hypothermia from the freezing temperatures. Also by knowing that in cold temperatures a group can sleep together to keep warm it lowers that chances that a group in low temperature could survive.
I don’t think using race could be used to understand the adaptations. To understand that adaptations you have to live in these areas and learn to survive and deal with these stresses. It is better to understand human variation by environmental influences because this is what these people deal with on a day to day basic where as if someone is a part of that ethnic background they wouldn’t have the necessary skills to adapt and survive as the indigenous person would.