Unique Amazon rainforests and Siberia: why are we all suffering from fires?
In our previous story, we wrote about fires in Siberia. Recently, the world has faced a new catastrophe — forests burned down in Amazon. Sure, fire is new to none of these areas but what if there is a common factor? Hmm. Let’s see.
Last month we published the story in which we reported that fire was killing a huge territory of the Siberia, and the government did almost nothing to slow the catastrophe down in time due to ‘projected extinguishing costs which might have exceeded the projected harm’. At the same time, illegal wood export might be the real cause of the fires:
…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.
For those who are curious on how big the actual fire area was, look at the picture — one day I sketched it down it and posted in my Instagram to visualize the size in a clearer way. My excuses it’s not of the best quality you have ever seen. The red square denotes the square of Moscow (roughly saying, 50*50 km), and the purple line represents the total square of active fires in August which equals to 4 mln. hectares or 16 Moscow-like cities. Today, nearly one Moscow is still burning in Siberia, and nobody’s gonna extinguish it.
Now let’s move to Amazon rainforests. In a recent material, Washington Post reported that the fires in Brazil coincided with the deforested areas which had been used as croplands. The underlying issue lies is Brazil’s economy — it has long relied on commodity exports, mostly from agriculture, and given that trade war between the US-China Brazil now has a real chance to outplay agricultural suppliers from the US by means of creating and utilizing as much croplands as possible.
What we see from both cases is meeting trade demands (China’s demands in particular) acts as a direct incentive to deforestation. Well, not a smart move as natural disasters is what we have in turn, and the expenses to recover the degraded areas will definitely exceed the export margin in the long run. It’s not new to say that sustainability needs no stupid business models anymore — killing nature is a one-way ticket to dig our graves as it just gives no guarantee both to us and younger generations. And results are already there: in Siberia, one of the biggest rivers Lena dried up this summer (just watch this video on YouTube) and the Arctic ice is at risk of fast-melting due to ashes settled on that area.
So can we ruin anything else? I bet we can. And we will!
That’s why this is the right moment to snooker us ourselves and take social business model on board.
- At first, we need to teach us using the land another way — take care of what we have already abandoned — which means investing in forests recultivating and lands recovery. Just listen how well Troy Wiseman did it, that smart way he reuses degraded lands is a real justification of his name :)
- Next, we have to simply replicate such approaches on a global scale. With no doubt, there have to be thousands of initiatives changing the way we think and act. Up to date, only one recovery project has been started in Russia — Russian air company S7 fundraised to plant 1 million trees in Siberia over the next two years. Sure, it is an insufficient response to a mismanaged disaster of this scale.
- Finally, we have to stay determined to what we’ll have learned, and this is a real challenge cos not many people can be consistent in fact.
And after all, I am just getting curious where our turning point is. Will it be enough for us to realize ‘Strike me dead! We sold our future! ’if one day China demands all the Siberian wood together with Brazilian agriculture? We’ll see, but that’s much better doing so before it happens.
***
Shake the world team.
