DThick smoke enveloped the Siberian city of Yakutsk. The forests in the Russian Far East have been burning for several weeks. The smog is now very serious, and the Yakutsk authorities stopped shipping and air traffic last weekend. This situation is not expected to improve until mid-August. This is the third consecutive year that a large area of forests in Siberia has caught fire. More than 200 burn According to the Ministry of Disaster Control of Russia, they are currently burning in the Republic of Yakutia. The affected area is approximately 1.52 million hectares, almost as large as Schleswig-Holstein.
Forest fire It is not uncommon in Siberia. The lightning strike ignited the dry forest floor. “In order to protect the larch forest, this is ecologically important,” said Elisabeth Dietze, a geographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute and Geographical Research Center in Potsdam. But the dimension of fire is new. On the one hand, the forest fire season lasts longer than ever. On the other hand, there are more fires not only smoldering on the ground, but also hitting treetops. As early as 2019 and 2020, fires in Siberia destroyed millions of hectares of forest. “The larger the area, the more intense the burning, and the longer the ecosystem needs to be renewed,” Dietze said.
About 3,500 people participated in the fire fighting
Yakutia is famous for its cold winters, with temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees. But the region is also struggling with warmer and warmer summers. The temperature in July is close to 40 degrees. Most importantly, this will have an impact on the permafrost that is slowly thawing. The fire accelerated this process. “After the fire, what is left is a black surface, which is less reflective and is heated more by solar radiation,” Dietze said. Permafrost, the organic layer above it, and forests are huge carbon reservoirs. When they burn, carbon compounds are released into the atmosphere and may cause global warming. This in turn promoted the emergence of new forest fires. In addition, the cold season does not mean that the fire will disappear: a Dutch researcher recently discovered that even in winter, summer fires will continue to smolder under the cover of snow.
There are currently about 3,500 people fighting fires in Yakutia. The reason why they have difficulty controlling the fire is not only because of the large area. “Most of the fires there were not even extinguished,” fire expert and Greenpeace activist Grigory Cooksing criticized in an interview with the online broadcaster Nastojaschee Vremja. “For economic reasons, out of poverty, we refused to put out the fire,” he said. However, for Johann Goldammer, a German fire ecologist at the Global Fire Monitoring Center, this is a matter of trade-off. Russia must ask itself: “What must we do? What can we do? Or what can we not do because we will not succeed?”
“We are suffocated, our respiratory organs are poisoned”
Most of the combustion zone is in the so-called control zone. Since 2015, it has been stipulated that if the cost of fighting fires is higher than the damage caused by the fire, local authorities do not have to take any measures in these areas. Firefighters usually only act when the flames threaten settlements. The regulations do not take into account the long-term costs of melting permafrost or the health consequences of smoke.
In addition to Yakutsk, 106 other inhabited places in the region are currently suffering from severe smog pollution.The situation is so bad that the residents of Yakutia petition the president Vladimir Putin Already turned. “We suffocated, and our respiratory organs were poisoned by the pungent smoke,” the promoter wrote. Most importantly, the condition of patients with corona is worsened by smoke.
“Russia is in a dilemma,” Goldamer said. On the one hand, it is responsible for the global climate budget. Extinguishing the fire prevents more carbon from entering the atmosphere. On the other hand, Russia is not the only responsibility for this development; climate change has global causes. One solution is to give value to carbon on land-in the sense of global carbon emissions trading. Then the non-burning forest has economic value. Ultimately, however, you must learn to coexist with fire in an ecosystem that is no longer balanced. “We are trying to stop the unstoppable development,” Goldammer said.
