The shadow of an aircraft of the Air Forest Protection Service flying over a burned forest in Siberia’s Sakha region on July 27. Russia’s coldest region is experiencing major wildfires for a third straight year. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)
By Robyn Dixon Washington Post
MOSCOW — For Russia, there are two types of fires raging across Siberia: the kind the authorities are fighting and the others they are allowing to burn.
That’s because Siberia is so vast that huge fires can burn without threatening any major settlements, transportation systems, or infrastructure — but are still part of a swath of infernos that together are larger than all the other blazes around the world.
On one level, the Siberian fires are part of an annual cycle. But many climate experts see the staggering scope of this year’s fires as another sign of greater fire risks on a warming planet that is potentially being made even hotter by huge carbon emissions from the blazes.
Siberia’s fires are pumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere
Russia is fighting more than 190 forest fires in Siberia that have closed airports and roads, forced widespread evacuations, and sent a pall of smoke across the North Pole. But it has abandoned dozens more fires covering thousands of square miles, with no effort to fight them.
Volunteers pause while working at the scene of a forest fire in the Gorny Ulus area, west of Yakutsk, Russia, on Aug. 7. (Ivan Nikiforov/AP)
As Russia faces one of its worst fire seasons, environmentalists say there is little urgency about an event that officials play down every year.
“For years, officials and opinion leaders have been saying that fires are normal, that the taiga is always burning, and there is no need to make an issue out of this. People are used to it,” said Alexei Yaroshenko, a forestry expert with Greenpeace Russia. The taiga is a belt of coniferous forest around the planet at between 50 and 60 degrees north of the equator.
As Russia increasingly confronts extreme weather associated with climate change, the rapid spread of fires in Yakutia — a vast forested Siberian region around the size of Argentina — came with drought, some of the hottest weather on record, and strong winds.
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