Summer wildfires are nothing new in Siberia, but bigger environmental changes are afoot.
Leonid BershidskyAugust 9, 2019, 6:56 PM GMT+2
Summer wildfires devouring Siberian forests are hardly unusual, but this year’s are a bigger worry than normal because clouds of smoke have reached big cities in the Asian part of Russia and because the authorities have reacted clumsily. The extra attention from the Russian and global media is welcome, even if it’s tinged with unnecessary alarmism: Russia needs to start planning for the climate change that’s beginning to transform its enormous forests. More fires aren’t the only change.So far this year, a total of 8.3 million hectares (20.5 million acres) of forest has burned out in Russia. That roughly equals the area of Austria; it’s undoubtedly a bad year. At the peak of the wildfires on July 23, the number of fires in the Russian woods was about three times the 17-year average for that day.
Russia’s forests occupy an area larger than Australia, and an overwhelming majority of the fires occur far from any human habitation, which often makes it uneconomical to try to put them out. This has prompted Moscow to hand the responsibility for the fire safety of remote forested areas to provincial authorities, which lack the resources to do much other than watch the trees burn and hope it rains. But that’s not something officials should ever say publicly, as Alexander Uss, governor of Krasnoyarsk in eastern Siberia, did this year; President Vladimir Putin soon sent troops to fight the flames in Uss’s region, forcing the governor abruptly to change tack. Russians see the vast forests as a key part of national wealth, even though forestry only accounts for about 1% of the country’s economic output.
Although there have been a few years when fires destroyed more of the woods than so far in 2019, there are still good reasons to worry. Most of these years have occurred quite recently. The average burned-up area between Jan. 1 and Aug. 1 has increased by two-thirds in the last 10 years compared with the previous decade.
In Russia’s Wildfires, Climate Change Is to Blame – Bloomberg
Summer wildfires are nothing new in Siberia, but bigger environmental changes are afoot. Leonid BershidskyAugust 9, 2019, 6:56 PM GMT+2 Summer wildfires devouring Siberian forests are hardly unusual, but this year’s are a bigger worry than normal because clouds of smoke have reached big cities in the Asian part of Russia and because the authorities… [Read More]
