A view of the Angara Icebreaker Museum in the smoke-covered Republic of Yakutia hit by wildfires. (Photo: Alexei KushnirenkoTASS via Getty Images)
A Russian weather monitor said on Monday that the forest fires that swept across Siberia were worsening due to NASA satellite images showing that the burning forests of Siberia were emitting thick smoke.
In the past few years, devastating forest fires have swept Siberia more and more frequently, and Russian meteorological officials and environmentalists have linked them to climate change and insufficient funding for forest services.
A UN climate expert published a report on Monday, which clearly stated that global warming is developing faster than people feared, and almost all of it is blamed on humans.
One of the worst-hit regions in Siberia this year is Yakutia-Russia’s largest and coldest region, located above permafrost-where both temperature and drought hit record highs.
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Russian meteorological monitoring agency Rosgidromet said on Monday that the situation in the region-also known as Sakha-“continues to deteriorate.”
According to Rosgidromet, there are currently nearly 3.4 million hectares of land burning in the area, including “difficult to access and remote” areas.
On Saturday, NASA said its satellite images showed that wildfire smoke had “reached the North Pole over 3,000 kilometers from Yakutia”, calling it “the first time on record.”
It added that on August 6, “most of Russia” was shrouded in thick smoke.
Environmentalists accuse the authorities of permitting large-scale burning under a law every year. If the cost of extinguishing fires exceeds the damage caused or does not affect residential areas, they cannot intervene.
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According to data from the Russian Forestry Agency, this year’s fires have destroyed more than 14 million hectares of land, which is the second worst fire season since the turn of the century.
Alexei Yaroshenko, head of the Greenpeace Russia Forest Project, linked the expansion of wildfires in Russia to the impact of climate change and “continuous decline in national forest management.”
