Another wildfire season has begun in Siberia, with nearly 200 active blazes. And after years of climate denialism, even Putin is starting to worry. Another wildfire season has begun in Siberia, with nearly 200 active blazes. Putin has acknowledged the urgency of tackling climate change, but continues to invest in coal in the meantime.
Siberia is under siege from fire. After a June of record temperatures, in recent days wildfires have erupted in north-eastern Russia, particularly in the Yakutia region. There are nearly 200 active blazes, while the hectares of forest destroyed by the flames have already reached one and a half million. A dramatic situation that worsens year after year, and one that has led President Vladimir Putin to speak publicly about the anthropogenic origins of global warming, after years of denialism.
At the end of June, Moscow recorded a temperature of 34.7 degrees Celsius. An exceptional heatwave, which was also felt in other parts of the country, Siberia included. Here the alert was immediately triggered for the possible outbreak of fires, after the territory was brought to its knees by flames in recent summers. And this year too the situation quickly spiralled out of control.
In just two weeks, an area equivalent to half the size of Florida burned. The region in greatest crisis is Yakutia, particularly around the city of Yakutsk. Thousands of people are losing the forests and fields that constitute their primary means of livelihood. The airport has been closed and vessel navigation on the Lena river has also been suspended. Thousands of firefighters are engaged in battling the flames, and the Kremlin has also dispatched military aircraft and ground vehicles in support. But the effects will also be felt further down the line, through the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere caused by the fires themselves.
Last year, the fires in Yakutia caused a release of carbon dioxide equivalent to the total fossil fuel consumption of all of 2018 in Mexico. At the frenzied pace of around 200 blazes in recent days, that figure can only worsen, and the consequences will be felt not only by local communities and the Siberian ecosystem, but by the entire planet, which survives thanks to its green lungs — now ailing, like the Amazon's.
Local communities in Yakutia are exhausted by the flames, and in some cases conspiracy theories are also being put forward. According to these, the fires are the work of the government, which benefits from global warming and the destruction of Siberian and Arctic territory because it gives it more free rein in extraction activities. Claims unconfirmed by evidence, though it is certainly true that Moscow's war on climate change has so far been inadequate.
In 2017, President Putin said that climate change does not have anthropogenic origins, openly admitting that the melting of Arctic glaciers could constitute a valuable boost to Russia's economic development. A view repeated two years ago, when Putin dwelt on the fact that periods of higher temperatures had also occurred in the past and could therefore be of natural origin. All of this, over the years, has been accompanied by an absence of real policies to combat global warming and by processes such as massive deforestation, which have paved the way for environmental tragedies such as the fires of recent summers.
It is perhaps for this reason that the president has, for some time now, begun to pay more heed to climate warnings. As early as 2020, he acknowledged the human hand in environmental disasters, stressing the need to pay greater attention to the issue and even going so far as to criticise the overexploitation of natural resources. In recent days, faced with the destruction of Siberia at the hands of the flames, Putin reiterated all of this, turning the spotlight on Russia's precarious position in this context.
In the Arctic area of the country, warming is in fact progressing at a rate 2.5 times faster than in the rest of the world. In recent times Moscow has also given substance to its president's statements, for example with a new law requiring companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions, so as to keep them under control. In any case, however, the country continues to invest in the production of fossil fuels, even more so than in the past. A sign that Putin's green turn is still a long way off.
