You may have heard about fires in Australia, the Amazon, or in California, but some of the worst wildfires are actually happening in the places you’d least expect. One of these places is Siberia, in northern Russia. Some of the threatened forests are so far north, they’re inside the Arctic Circle.
If the Arctic being on fire wasn’t a shocking enough reminder of climate change’s impact on the planet, the further damage the fires pose in terms of emissions is horrifying.
Just this year, fires in the taigaforests of Siberia alone pumped 970 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere between June and August. This was more than all the forest fires in the rest of the world put together.
Greenpeace has teams of volunteers that to take bold action against environmental threats now means it has teams of volunteers on the firefighting frontlines – from the northern forests of Russia to the tropical forests of Indonesia.