Forests are dying due to global warming

Red forests are one of the manifestations of rapid climate change. In Ukraine, almost all coniferous plantations are under threat – and this is a third of the total area. Oak groves are also in danger.

Huge areas of damage are located in the Carpathians and Polissya. There is no forestry where there is no “biological fire”, as it is called by foresters.

What global warming has to do with that? Ukraine falls into a zone where the annual temperature rises three times faster than the world as a whole. Now it has risen by 1.4 ° C (the last century in Kyiv the norm was +8.4 ° C). At first glance, nothing bad – for a person and really almost imperceptible. But for plants, these are very serious changes and they do not have time to adapt.

Summer has become dry and hot, and conifers, for example, need moisture and coolness. Trees in adverse conditions become weakened. Instead, the pests found themselves in an improved environment. The bark beetle, which have been living in the trees for thousands of years, now reproduces not twice as before, but 3-5 times during the warm season. Not only does it destroy the tree itself, it also infects it with fungi. A weakened plant cannot resist the pest and disease, and within a month a healthy tree dies.

Today in Ukraine more than 400 thousand hectares of forests are affected. This area is comparable to half of Chernivtsi region. Half of this area is pine, but spruce and oak are also drying up. In Polissya, for example, 15% of forests are already infected, and the epidemic threshold is 6%. This problem is also faced in other countries, but our situation is one of the worst, because we have many industrial plantations with monocultures, where pests spread much faster.

This is the unobvious connection between the excessive use of fossil fuels by mankind and the mass destruction of forests.