Siberia’s on fire!
Right at this moment, over 4 million hectares of unique Siberian forests larger than Denmark are burning down. At ‘Shake the world’ we can’t ignore the catastrophe — with this material we are calling for any initiative which would positively affect the degraded areas. Read us, help Siberia, and join the world-changers.
Imagine that one day your lungs inexplicably began burning down from within. You feel a hard attacking pain and can’t take it anymore. You know that your family is pretty rich and can afford medication, so you ask your parents to help. However, your parents make haughty smiles right to your face and say: ‘There’s no economic reason in curing you. You’re gonna die,’ and then drive away in a new Bently. This pretty well describes what was happening in Siberia one week ago.
Forest fire is not new to Russia. For the last 10 years, there have been three: 2010, 2012, and 2015. Annually, the fires degrade an area of over 11 million hectares, equal to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark combined. This year, at the beginning of July, Siberia faced the catastrophe again: around 4.3 million hectares are still under fire, and 90% of the forest still have no curing. The point sits in the counterproductive Russian Foresty Code of 2015 which allows no firefighting in the ’zones of control’ which are supposed to be remote areas. Those zones turned to be a nice excuse for not taking actions — several governors kept saying the very same phrase — “projected extinguishing costs exceed their projected harm” — even when the fires have spread beyond the designated areas.
It is hard to believe that the authorities estimated projected costs against the unique Siberian pine forests, the health of people left with no help and breathing poisonous smoke with every breath they took, biological diversity with many species died and suffered. Even harder to believe that, according to the Russian media and the interview of ex-chair-person of Krasnoyarsk regional accounts chamber Tatiana Davydenko, Russian governors might have illegally let cutting out Siberian forests — 30 billion cubic meters of wood were annually cut as forest sanitation, but then sold and shipped to China without properly paying duties and taxes. For doing so, trees could be kindled to set the upper fire which makes no harm to the trees for further export disposal. In 2018, the analysis of Greenpeace’s Global Mapping Hub confirmed a number of wildfires had been spatially linked with logging sites.
The social reaction was massive: over 1 million people condemned the authorities and signed the petition to state emergency and start extinguishing immediately. In social media people keep posting thousands of pictures of lands and cities full of tough dark-grey smog, videos of animals pinched with hunger and came to people for begging food and water. While most of the Russian celebrities kept blaming those in power for not taking preventive actions, Leonardo DiCaprio posted on Instagram to catch the worldwide attention, and the US President Donald Trump and the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte offered their hands with the firefighting to Vladimir Putin. However, until the public screamed out loud there had been no real action taken by the federal center. Specifically, one of the governors of the region most suffered from fire put that straight: there is no point to extinguish these fires. Having the whole month wasted, Vladimir Putin directed to start extinguishing on the 1st August only.
Unfortunately, scientists say this has grown past a local problem as the smoke and propellant gases are spreading fast beyond Russia to Central Asia and North America, as far as Vancouver and Seattle, and only natural rainfall can constrain the spreading ash. Sadly, this catastrophe will have a crucial impact on the whole global environment — the Siberian fires are emitting more than 166 Mt CO2, nearly as much as 36 million cars emit a year, according to Greenpeace says. Moreover, fires affect faster ice melting in the Arctic due to ashes settling on that area.
Definitely, there’s an urgent need for initiatives and changes. Several Russian companies have already arranged funds for faster forests recovery, but that’s not enough: planting 1 million trees is an insufficient response to a mismanaged disaster of this scale.
Therefore we call for all sorts of initiatives from every world-changer willing to contribute to Siberia’s unique heritage — to prevent and fight the fires, to save the animals, to inspect and renew the forests, to defend and recultivate the lands, to inform and assist the people suffered from smoke and fire — especially at those remote and under-resourced areas of Siberia.
At the end of the day, guarding forests against fire is not a matter of choice regardless of the place we live in, but a universal obligation which keeps the whole world’s sustainability forward.
Put your ideas into action. Save Siberia. Help the world.
