Forests in Russia began to burn less

The Ministry of Natural Resources on Monday reported: there are about the same number of forest fires this year as in the past, but their area has decreased by almost three times. But summer in many regions of the country is both hot and dry … MK asked Grigory Kuksin, head of the Greenpeace fire program in Russia, if our forests really began to burn less, and if so, why.

Can you trust statistics?

— There really is a difference in areas, but it is profitable to compare with last year, which set an absolute record for the area of ​​forest fires in the entire history of observations…

All our forests are federally owned by law, but forest protection and fire extinguishing have been transferred to the regions, which receive special money and subventions from the federal budget to perform this function, and the center controls how they are spent. The share of regional financing is very small, only rich subjects of the Russian Federation allow themselves this. And federal money is clearly not enough. This was finally recognized after last year’s massive fires, which led to an increase in funding. In 2022, about 40 billion rubles were allocated for forestry, of which about 16 billion rubles were allocated for extinguishing fires (a year earlier, about 6 billion rubles were allocated for extinguishing fires. – “MK”), but you need several times more.

We usually have two peaks of fires – in spring and summer. In the spring, it is mostly the non-forest fund that burns, and at the meetings they carefully keep silent that in fact this year more than 1000 houses burned down from landscape fires, there are victims.

– Landscape fires arise mainly due to grass burning?

– Yes. Man-made history, complicated by the weather. There is no single methodology for accounting for such fires, and the regions sometimes pretend that nothing happened.

In the summer, fires start in the forest fund, and they already have to be counted. Here the situation looks like this. Approximately 50% of Russian forests are protected from fires, there are ground zones where people can be quickly delivered to extinguish on the ground by cars, and there are zones where they can only be delivered by planes and helicopters (people are needed – dropping water from aircraft does not make practical sense) . This half accounts for about half of forest fires. But the second half of the forests belongs to the so-called. control zones. A crafty name: after all, these are just those forests where we refuse to put out fires and just watch them.

So, on a typical July day in protected forests, about 100 fires were extinguished, and in unprotected forests, about 100 fires were not extinguished. But those 100 fires that were extinguished are 10 times smaller in area than those where the situation developed spontaneously …

– Do other forest countries, like the USA or Canada, also have “zones of control”?

— Just the US and Canada are the ideologists of this approach. Unfortunately, these countries cannot cope with fires, much like we do, despite the fact that the US and Canada have much larger economies and better equipped fire departments. There is another very serious problem that we are struggling with, but they are not: the so-called. preventive burning.

– Is it when strips are burned around forest areas, as if to prevent the spread of fire, if a fire suddenly breaks out?

– We are more or less reasonably burning strips, and they say: it’s better to let there be many fires that we arrange ourselves, but weaker than one natural, but strong. This practice does not work in the face of climate change, when there are no small fires in small areas – almost all of them develop into catastrophic ones. Here we need, from my point of view, to go our own way, to continue to strengthen the protection of forests. And there is good news here. The other day, new rules for extinguishing forest fires in Russia were published, which will come into force next spring – a new procedure for the allocation of control zones has been established there, which should reduce their area by almost half. It is very important. Of course, the question of financial support for the new rules immediately arises if we undertake to put out fires in a larger area …

— What about forest fires in Russia now?

– In most regions, including the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, where quite recently everything was serious, forest fires really began to decline, because it’s still the fall. Now the most alarming situation is in central Russia and in the northwest. The fears are caused by hot and dry weather, but fires do not start because of the heat. Even in the summer and even in the Siberian regions, about 10% of fires are caused by thunderstorms, the remaining 90% are on the conscience of people.

In the European part of Russia, we do not have control zones, all fires are extinguished. And after 2010, there have been positive changes. The great merit of foresters and firefighters is that peat fires began to be extinguished much more thoroughly and at an early stage. As a result, despite the hot and dry summer in places, everything is more or less calm, there are no strong smokes. All of us – volunteers, foresters, and firefighters – go to all fires.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28848 dated August 17, 2022

Newspaper headline:
You can extinguish with money