Konstantin Gribanov: "Forest Fires Will Nullify All Efforts to Reduce Carbon Emissions"

10:02, May 12, 2022

University expert called not to set fires in the forests

The cause of forest fires is not only climate change, but also an increase in the number of people burning fires in the forests, says Konstantin Gribanov, leading specialist of the Climate and Environmental Physics Laboratory at Ural Federal University. He told about it at the press-conference in TASS, devoted to the influence of the Ural climate change on the environment.

"Forest fires are caused not only by the climate, but also by the fact that there are more people and they are behaving worse. We can switch to electric cars, green technologies, but forest fires cancel out all efforts to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Yet everyone can do their part to fight fires - not burn fires. Our country is huge, we just do not have that many firefighters for every square kilometer of forest. Even the entire population of the country cannot cope with the amount of fires burning now. That is why the main appeal is as follows: we must behave properly in the forest," says the expert.

The Ural Federal University created a carbon polygon to measure the level of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by the forests of the Ural. Specialists of the polygon believe that it is necessary to work on measuring carbon emissions from forest fires into the atmosphere and fluxes absorbed by forests from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. This is necessary in order to track whether Russian forests absorb more carbon than they emit, despite the volume of fires.

"Now climate warming and carbon sequestration have become a political issue. Until 2000, Russia was considered a runoff - a forest country that absorbs atmospheric carbon. No one doubted or argued about this. However, large-scale forest fires caused Russia to be accused of releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than absorbing it. To prove that our territories are still runoff (we have huge areas of forests and swampy Western Siberia), we have to weigh all carbon flows up and down," explains Konstantin Gribanov.

The main difficulty is that there is no accurate system for measuring absorbed carbon in the world, the measurement error can be several times higher than the declared values. And the carbon polygon program at UrFU is partly aimed at determining these indicators. The Ural scientists are working on a task that neither domestic nor foreign colleagues have solved yet.

The news article was translated by UrFU International Marketing Office
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