UN conclusion: due to forest fires Russia risks becoming a "pollutant of the planet"

Lyubov Yakubovskaya , employee of the Center for Wildlife Conservation

“It is quite obvious that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, - these words are given at the very beginning of the report, and this greatly distinguishes it from previous versions, which only assumed the possibility of a strong influence of anthropogenic factors on climate change.

The World Climate Conference will take place in Glasgow in the fall, and the report of the UN climate group will be the main topic of discussion. What will Russia look like in the light of new climate challenges?

Thus, the report calls into question the achievement of the goals declared by the Paris Agreement of 2015, when countries agreed to prevent an increase in the average annual temperature on the planet by 2100 by more than 2 ° C from the pre-industrial level and to do everything possible to keep warming within 1.5 ° C. It should be recalled that achieving these agreements at one time seemed a very ambitious task, and now, in the IPCC report, all considered temperature scenarios predict that the 1.5 ° C mark will be passed by 2040. This is despite the fact that emissions should be reduced by six times. If the emission rates remain at the current level, then the 1.5 ° C threshold will be exceeded in less than 10 years.

When climate change problems only became the topic of interstate agreements, during the Kyoto Protocol (1992), when it was assumed that the polluting countries would pay compensation to countries that ensure the absorption of surplus greenhouse gases, one could expect that Russia would become one of the key recipients of such compensation. The industry of the country then stood, and the system of forest protection and fire extinguishing was not reduced and, despite all the economic difficulties, it functioned. At the end of the last century, Russia really was an oxygen donor on the planet. It cannot be said that since then the domestic industry has made such a technological leap to ensure an increase in the well-being of ordinary citizens of the country, this has not happened, but in fact Russia is turning into a significant polluter of the planet. Smoke from the Yakut fires has already reached the North Pole, and its traces are recorded, at least throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

The past decade has already become the hottest in 125 thousand years, but further forecasts are only worse. At the beginning of the 20th century, the probability of an extremely strong heat wave in a particular summer was 1 in 50. Now, keeping in mind the catastrophic summer of 2010, we understand that the frequency of abnormal summer heat has decreased to once a decade, but in the “world + 1.5 ° "Abnormal heat will occur more often than once every six years, and in the world" + 2 ° "- once every three and a half years, and this will become a sad reality.

Among the measures to reduce emissions that affect climate change, the main one is the elimination of the use of fossil fuels. For the Russian economy, this is practically a verdict. Are the Russian authorities ready to withstand such a challenge of the era? And how do they explain to citizens, elites and themselves that they have largely ignored climate threats so far?

Despite the fact that in the UN report the "battle for one and a half degrees" is recognized as practically lost, experts consider it necessary to fight against an even greater rise in temperatures and the inclusion of irreversible processes. These include, for example, greenhouse methane emissions from permafrost thawing. And these are exactly the consequences to which the blazing fires of Yakutia lead.

According to the official information of Avialesokhrana On August 9, 2021, 1 572 967 hectares of forests blazed in Russia, and 1 417 718 hectares directly in Yakutia. On the morning of the 11th, the data for August 10 will be published. No one has any hope that this figure will be less than the previous one - the resources of the firefighters are at the limit, heavy rains are not expected.

Now Yakutia is the most burning territory on the planet. According to experts, only in the north of the region the share of fires of natural, thunderstorm origin prevails, in the rest of the territory the main cause of fire is man. The regional authorities are doing their best to suppress the dissemination of information, which has long been a Punchinelle secret - illegal logging is masked by fires. This is not the know-how of Yakutia, this phenomenon is known throughout Siberia, but a number of unfavorable factors coincided in Yakutia this year, and what used to be just a disaster has now become a catastrophe of a planetary scale. A man-made disaster.

The state system of fire extinguishing and forest protection has been cut and cut many times against the background of previous gloomy forecasts about the situation with the climate. Will the data of the new report of the UN climate group influence the behavior of the Russian authorities?