Siberia just experienced wildfires on a staggering scale. Russia is rethinking how to fight them

MOSCOW — Four years ago, Russia instituted a policy of letting remote forest fires burn unless it made sense economically to put them out. Environmentalists warned that the new rules would intensify Siberia’s annual fire season and release more greenhouse gases into the air. The public, for the most part, didn’t pay attention to the regulation change.

That changed this summer when fires swept quickly through thousands of square miles of Siberian forest and strong winds spread smoke and ash across a third of the country. For several days, dark clouds blanketed the cities of Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk — each home to more than a million people — hundreds of miles from the fires’ epicenter.

Siberians begged the government to ignore the cost efficiency regulations and extinguish the remote fires. Russian President Vladimir Putin finally sent in military planes and helicopters to douse the flames. Now Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the government to examine the “control zone” burn regulations when parliament meets next month. A change in the policy could have far-reaching benefits in the fight against climate change.

Russia has the largest forested area in the world, covering about 45% of the country. Much of that forest is remote and difficult to reach, which creates unique challenges when battling fires, whether they are in the taiga forests of the Krasnoyarsk region or the Arctic tundra in the republic of Sakha.

Rains and cooling temperatures in Siberia this month have helped keep the fires in check for the moment, but Greenpeace estimated in mid-August that only 9% had been extinguished and that by the end of the season the burn area could break the 2012 record of nearly 70,000 square miles. It estimated that the fires had already released 138 megatons of carbon dioxide, more than the annual emissions of many countries.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-21/russia-siberia-forest-fires-policy-change