The Human Causes of the World's Crippling Megafires

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. It originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

Much of the world is on fire. From the Amazon rainforest to Siberia and the Arctic, wildfires alone are releasing more carbon emissions into the air every month than Sweden does in a year. In Russia, a forest the size of England burned down this year. And in Greenland, the amount of ice that melted in a single day could cover the entire surface of the Netherlands with half a metre of water.

Can we still stop this trend or is this the new norm? To find out, I recently spent some time with a group of volunteer firefighters in Karelia, a region in northwestern Russia, 97 percent of which is covered in forest. The area is the westernmost point of the Russian taiga. The world's combined taiga forest is estimated to stand almost twice as large as the US, and represents around 30 percent of all the forestry in the world. According to NASA satellite systems, both the duration and intensity of fires are increasing throughout the taiga.

After a four-hour train journey from Saint Petersburg, followed by a one-hour drive, I'm sitting in a rubber motorboat in Karelia's enormous Lake Ladoga – a body of water almost the same size as Wales. We navigate past a wall of trees that extends along the coast to the horizon, only interrupted by islands covered in even more trees. We stop at one of these remote islands, where three troops of volunteers base themselves for three months over the summer, to try and extinguish the countless fires across a 200 square-kilometre region.

The volunteers are led by Grigory Kuksin, head of Greenpeace's Russian firefighting operation. Kuksin has been fighting fires since 1998. His first task 20 years ago was was to mobilise the Russian government to take on the flames that were spreading across national parks near Moscow, in an area known as "the motherland of grains". Kuksin and his then-group of volunteers were successful, and he's trying to replicate that same spirit here in Lake Ladoga. But it's not easy – most people believe that these fires are natural and cannot be controlled, while Kuksin is trying to show that most of the damage is man-made, and thus avoidable.

Kuksin is a vocal critic of Putin's government. Four years ago, following a series of cuts to the fire service, the Russian government introduced a new policy that effectively leaves remote forest fires to burn, leaving gigantic regions where the state does nothing to fight fires. So to tackle these massive fires, teams of volunteers throughout Russia are now taking matters into their own hands. Kuksin's unit here in Lake Ladoga, for example, extinguishes dozens of forest fires every year, and prevents many more from spreading. According to official statistics, about 669,000 hectares of Russian land were burned by forest fires in the first half of 2016 – but Greenpeace, using satellite data, believes that figure was grossly understated and closer to 3.5 million hectares. Part of Kuksin's work to reduce the frequency of the fires is to educate locals and the wider population about the true causes of these fires. So far, he has taken his message to more than 8,000 schools and countless local and national TV stations.

Once ashore, my guide points to a bare, windy stone plain where my dome tent has been set up. Just behind the tent, in a small piece of forest, he shows me the toilet – a simple structure of boards and rags around a deep hole that is full of shit, dug on a rolling hill. On the furthest point of the rock, a tarpaulin imitation-yurt is almost blowing away. I later learn that's the sauna.

"Nine out of ten fires in Russia are caused by people," Kuksin says over breakfast the next morning. In this region, the main causes are campfires and cigarettes. There is a lot of peat soil in and around the taiga, and the biggest challenge these volunteers face is that peat burns underground. If you throw a cigarette on the floor, or light a campfire, you may not notice the fire simmering underneath the soil when you walk away. Meanwhile, it could spread metres deep into the ground. The old plant material burns slowly until the fire reaches the surface again, which can happen tens of miles away from the original source. Many people therefore think that the fires are due to natural causes, when in reality they're caused by human carelessness.

In the southern Siberian areas, where the biggest fires are raging, Kuksin tells me that these fires are caused by the activity of farmers. "Russian farmers burn grass because they think it makes the soil fertile, but these grass fires can result in hugely destructive forest and peat fires," Kuksin explains. Burning grass is actually forbidden in Russia, but every year satellite images show that it's still happening on a large scale.

But what about the even more sparsely populated areas that are on fire, like the Arctic? In many cases, these fires are caused by lightning, which is expected to become more prevalent as a result of global warming. Moreover, it's almost impossible to extinguish them. Sander Veraverbeke, an Earth Systems scientist at the VU University in Amsterdam, published a study in 2017 in which he analysed the influence of lightning on the occurrence of recent forest fires. "If we calibrate the model to the end of the century, we expect three times more lightning as a result of global warming," he tells me on the phone. It's hard to predict exactly, but at current vegetation levels we can expect to see two or even three times as many fires as we do now, by the end of the century. Where forest areas in the taiga used to burn less than once every 100 years, it now takes an average of only 50 years before the same area is hit again.

"I don't really care if a fire was caused by lightning or by a person," Kuksin says. "If we can prevent the human fires, it will also help in the fight against climate change, because less CO2 will be released into the air."

We're back in the motorboat at 6AM the next day for a nine-hour journey to a peat fire 200 kilometres away, in an area that often burns for months every year. It's starting to get dark when we finally arrive. A persistent layer of smoke smothers the air and fades the setting light even more.

Kuksin wants to show us how difficult it is to tackle the blaze once the land itself has lit up. First, we have to find a stream to fetch water. That takes an hour. After we eventually find one, we walk to an area where the smoke is especially dense, and then make our way through wild purple flowers, until we reach the end of a field where the peat has burned a metre-deep hole into the ground.

Everywhere around us, the ground is on fire, burning far down in the earth. Kuksin's team push their fire extinguisher deep into the soil, alongside a long thermometer to gauge when the fire is out. A group of nine volunteer firefighters spend the next three hours putting out a ten-square-metre piece of peat. It's completely dark when the fire is technically out. Still, plumes of smoke stream from the ground.

As difficult as it was to fight this peat fire, it's nothing compared to the challenges in more remote areas. Hardly anyone lives in the vast swathes of Eastern Siberia or the Arctic, and therefore it's very hard to get people out there to fight fires that subsequently burn for months. Meanwhile, the Russian government are happy to continue to allow these secluded areas to burn. But public pressure could change things. Earlier this year, there was widespread anger over the smog that began drifting from Siberia into more suburban areas. Over half a million Russians signed a petition demanding the government put the fire out. Surprisingly, Putin responded – ordering the army at the end of July to deal with it – but with very little success.

NASA recently announced a “Global Fire Atlas” – an open service that in combination with modern satellite technology will mean we can all detect any fire blazing anywhere in the world within three hours. But even with that information, how do we decide whether or not a fire is worth the trouble of extinguishing?

"We want to fight fires to combat the climate impact, not just to save people," says Veraverbeke, "But for that you have to make a cost-benefit analysis. The scientific world is now trying to come to such a trade-off by giving carbon a monetary value."

After extinguishing fires for three hours, it feels like I've been rubbing hot sauce on the inside of my nose. Despite the huge effort here, it's hard to shake the sense of doom that comes with the realisation that hundreds of thousand of trees and fields around the world are on fire right now. Kuksin has been fighting fires all of his working life, has met thousands of people and convinced perhaps hundreds of them to join his fight. When they spread the word, hopefully others will be inspired to take action. At the same time, it can feel futile – the fires start again every year, this year more than ever before. But as Kuksin and his volunteers have shown me, it's not an option to do nothing.