Significant decrease in wildfires raging in Siberia

MOSCOW • Wildfires raging in Siberia in record summer temperatures have decreased considerably over the past week, Russia's forest service said yesterday, as it continues to battle blazes.

Freakishly warm weather across large swathes of Siberia since January, combined with low soil moisture, has contributed to a resurgence of wildfires that devastated the region last summer, the European Union's climate monitoring network said last week.

Both the number and intensity of fires in Siberia and parts of Alaska have increased since mid-June, resulting in the highest carbon emissions for the month - 59 million tonnes of carbon dioxide - since records began in 2003.

Russia's Aerial Forest Protection Service said it was trying to suppress 136 fires over 43,000ha as of yesterday. Firefighters are using explosives to contain the fires, and cloud seeding with silver iodide to encourage rain, it said.

However, most of the fires have been deemed too remote and expensive to handle, with more than 333,000ha currently ablaze in areas where all firefighting efforts have stopped. This is considerably smaller than a week ago, when the service reported fires over a total of two million hectares.

From mid-June, regions in Russia's far north, including beyond the Arctic circle, have registered unprecedented heat records.

Russia's weather expert Roman Vilfand had said anti-cyclones - which create abnormally clear skies with no clouds or rain - had increased in the northern hemisphere. In the Arctic, where the sun does not set in the summer, this means that sunlight is heating the Earth's surface around the clock, increasing the risk of fires, he added.

Fresh satellite images showed yesterday that the largest fires are still in Russia's vast Yakutia region, which is sparsely populated and borders the Arctic Ocean. The region announced a state of emergency on July 2 due to the wildfires.

Greenpeace Russia's forest programme said yesterday that 9.26 million hectares - greater than the size of Portugal - have been impacted by wildfires since the beginning of this year. The organisation blames Russia's wildfire crisis on a lack of funding of the forest service, which now cannot ensure adequate fire prevention.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE