Climate Change Behind Increase in Forest Fires in Russian North, Krasnoyarsk Scholars Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 8 – Global warming is not only behind the increase in the number of forest fires in Russia’s Arctic regions, but those fires are releasing carbon previously contained in the permafrost there and thus increasing climate change elsewhere in Russia and the world, scholars at the Russian Academy of Sciences Center in Krasnoyarsk say.

            According to the researchers there, temperatures in the Arctic are now rising twice as fast as they are for the world as a whole. As a result, the air and ground are drier and fires are more likely to ignite more often and burn longer and over wider areas of the region (arctic.ru/climate/20250807/1040283.html).

            This is especially the case in the eastern portion of Russia’s Arctic region where fires are now “twice as intense” as they are in the west. But no one should be under the illusion that this is a local problem. In fact, the Center’s Yevgeny Primakov says, they are rapidly becoming a problem for the world as a whole.

            That is because fires there are “leading to emissions of carbon previously ‘locked’ in the permafrost and thus increase global warming” in places far removed from the Russian North, he says.