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The blazes are consuming millions of hectares of pristine Boreal forests in Russia, which are second only to the world’s tropical jungles in capturing planet-warming carbon emissions.

At the same time, the drier and harsher conditions associated with a warmer climate — June was the hottest ever recorded — are contributing to the fires becoming ever bigger and more common.

The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that not only is the Earth on track for its hottest year on record, it is warming at a faster rate than expected.

Temperatures for the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and “new highs” in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said.

Russia’s forests annually absorb a net 500 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, said Anatoly Shvidenko, who spent decades in the Soviet forestry system and served as an expert for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

That figure is the equivalent to the emissions put off over a year by 534 coal-burning power plants.

With expected climate change and current levels of forest protection in Russia, “forest fire danger and carbon emissions will double or triple by the end of the century,” added Shvidenko, saying authorities pay less attention to the problem now than in the 1990s or the Soviet era.

The thinning forests are most evident in northern Siberia, where fires can ravage plant life and shallow roots, making it impossible for trees to regrow for centuries.

Russian forest scientists call the process “green desertification,” said Shvidenko……

Scientists have been sounding the alarm over the fate of the planet’s boreal forests, also called taiga, which wrap around the northern hemisphere covering vast areas mainly in Canada and Russia, where they constitute 90 percent of all forest cover.

Wildfires in Canada this year have already amounted to the costliest disaster in the country’s history by causing $2.75 billion in damage, displacing about 100,000 people and sweeping through more than a million acres (405,000 hectares) of forest.

In Russia, 43 million hectares of forest managed by the national forest agency was lost between 2000 and 2011, mostly in the Far North, Shvidenko said, an area almost the size of Iraq.

This, combined with growing wildfires, could alter the role of Russia’s forests as a carbon sink, currently second only to the world’s tropical forests…….http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/22/world/science-health-world/russian-wildfires-put-key-climate-change-resource-risk/#.V5LjXdJ97Gi