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Siberia Is on Fire—and It’s Only May Advertisement Last week, authorities put Novobirsk’s 1.7 million residents under what’s known as a “black sky” air quality warning as smoke from nearby wildfires blanketed the city. In late April, the Siberian Times reported that 27 houses were destroyed in the city of Kemerovo and 50 in Russia’s third-largest city of Novosibirsk, with more destruction in other surrounding districts. As summer approaches, fires in Siberia like these are showin...

On their own, each of the numerous weather calamities that befell the world in 2020 would be a crisis. But hurricane, floods, and wildfires intersected with the pandemic in ways that tested emergency response systems in ways they haven’t before. Piling the climate crisis on top of a public health crisis not only put evacuees in danger of contracting covid-19 while simultaneously losing everything they owned, it also strained disaster response resources and almost certainly contributed to ongo...