Since the beginning of the year, five million hectares of forest have already burned in Russia – mainly taiga, according to data from Avialesookhrana.
The area of burned forests, over 99% of which is in the regions of Siberia and the Far East, has become a record for the past four years.
“In 2022 and 2023, we were very lucky with the weather in most of the large taiga regions, which make the main contribution to the total area of forest fires. The summer was relatively damp, without very long droughts and periods of abnormal heat,” Alexey Yaroshenko, former head of the forestry project for Russian Greenpeace, explained to Kedr.
Currently, a state of emergency is in effect across the entire territory of Yakutia, Buryatia, Zabaikalsky and Krasnoyarsk Krais, as well as in areas of four other regions due to forest fires. In Yakutia, which is currently experiencing a heat wave, over 700 thousand hectares of taiga are burning, almost half of which the authorities have refused to extinguish.
Every year, millions of hectares of forest burn in Russia. Sometimes, fires spread to populated areas. As a result, plants, people and animals die. Meteorologists largely associate the spread of forest fires, which are increasingly difficult to control, with anthropogenic climate change.
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