The Hindu : International : Siberian fires pose a threat to planet's health

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 01, 2005

International

International

Siberian fires pose a threat to planet's health

Tim Radford

KRASNOYARSK (SIBERIA): Fires in the Siberian forests — the largest in the world and vital to the planet's health — have increased tenfold in the last 20 years and could again rage out of control this summer, Russian scientists warn.

They say they have neither the money nor the equipment to control or extinguish the huge forests fires often started illegally and deliberately in the Russian far east by rogue timber firms who plan to sell cheap lumber to China.

In 2003, one of the hottest summers in Europe, 22 million hectares of spruce, larch, fir, Scots pine and oak were destroyed, charred, scorched or in some way affected by fire.

On one day in June that year, a U.S. satellite recorded 157 fires across almost 11million hectares, sending a plume of smoke that reached Kyoto 5,000 km away.

Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen. The world's forests are part of the calculations behind the Kyoto agreement, ratified by Russia, Britain and many other nations, but not the U.S. nor Australia, to control the greenhouse emissions that fuel global warming.

Carbon trading

Forests have also become part of the currency of exchange, called carbon trading, intended to keep economies stable while limiting emissions overall. Most attention has been focused on the steady destruction of the surviving Amazon and Indonesian forests.

But the so-called ``boreal'' forests of Siberia, slow-growing but huge, are equally vital. They became a global issue in 2003, when so many fires raged in Siberia and the Far East that atmospheric scientists identified their smoke and soot in Seattle, on the far side of the Pacific.

``You should try to protect your forests, because they are the lungs of the planet: they absorb carbon dioxide,'' said Anatoly Sukhinin, of the Sukachev Institute of Forestry in Krasnoyarsk. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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