Thick smoke envelops the Siberian city of Yakutsk.

The forests in Russia's Far East have been on fire for weeks.

The smoke is now so bad that the authorities in Yakutsk stopped shipping and air traffic last weekend.

The situation is not expected to improve until mid-August.

It is the third year in a row that huge areas of forest are on fire in Siberia.

According to the Russian disaster control ministry, more than 200 fires are currently blazing in the republic of Yakutia.

At around 1.52 million hectares, the area affected is almost as large as Schleswig-Holstein.

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Forest fires are not uncommon in Siberia.

Lightning strikes ignite the dry forest floor.

“This is ecologically important in order to preserve the larch forest,” says geographer Elisabeth Dietze from the Alfred Wegener Institute and Geo Research Center in Potsdam.

But the dimension of the fires is new.

On the one hand, the forest fire season lasts longer than it used to be.

On the other hand, there are more fires that not only smolder on the ground, but also hit tree tops.

As early as 2019 and 2020, fires in Siberia destroyed several million hectares of forest.

"The more area and the more intensely it burns, the longer the ecosystem needs to regenerate," says Dietze.

Around 3500 people are involved in fighting fires

Yakutia is known for icy winters with temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees. But the region is also struggling with ever warmer summers. In July temperatures reach almost 40 degrees. Above all, this has consequences for the permafrost soil, which is slowly thawing. The fires speed up this process. “After a fire, what remains is a black surface that is less reflective and is warmed up more by solar radiation,” says Dietze. The permafrost soil, the organic layers above it and the forests are huge carbon stores. When they burn, carbon compounds are released into the atmosphere and can contribute to global warming. This in turn favors the emergence of new forest fires. In addition, the cold season does not mean that the fires will go away: a Dutch researcher recently discoveredthat the summer fires can continue to smolder under the snow cover even in winter.

Around 3500 people are currently fighting fires in Yakutia.

The fact that it is difficult for them to get the fires under control is not only due to the huge area.

"Most of the fires there are not even put out", criticized the fire protection expert and Greenpeace activist Grigorij Kuksin in an interview with the online broadcaster Nastojaschee Vremja.

“We refuse to put out the fires for economic reasons, out of poverty,” he says.

For the German fire ecologist Johann Goldammer from the Global Fire Monitoring Center, however, this is a question of weighing up.

Russia must ask itself: “What do we have to do?

What can we do?

Or what can we not do because we will not make it? "

"We suffocate, our respiratory organs are poisoned"

Most of the burning areas are in so-called controlled zones. Since 2015 there has been a rule that the local authorities do not have to do anything in these zones if the costs of extinguishing them are higher than the damage caused by the fire. Firefighters often only take action when the flames threaten settlements. Long-term costs due to the thawing permafrost soil or health consequences due to smoke development are not taken into account in the regulation.

In addition to the city of Yakutsk, there are 106 other inhabited places in the region that are currently suffering from extreme smoke pollution. The situation is so dire that residents of Yakutia turned to President Vladimir Putin with a petition. "We suffocate, our respiratory organs are poisoned by the acrid smoke," write the initiators. Above all, the condition of corona patients is aggravated by the smoke.

"Russia is in a dilemma," says Goldammer. On the one hand, there is responsibility for the global climate budget. Fighting fires can prevent even more carbon from entering the atmosphere. On the other hand, Russia is not solely responsible for this development; climate change has global causes. One solution would be to put the terrestrially bound carbon in value - in the sense of global carbon emissions trading. Then a non-burning forest has an economic value. Ultimately, however, you have to learn to live with fire in an ecosystem that is no longer in balance. “We are trying to stop a development that cannot be stopped,” says Goldammer.