Black Skies Over Siberia: the most polluted major city in Russia

A Russian city nestled in the vast Siberian forest — 2,000 miles and four times zones east of Moscow — has air so bad that the authorities regularly warn people to stay inside.

During frequent “black sky” events, caused by Soviet-era factories and coal-fired power plants, the city of Krasnoyarsk has clocked the dirtiest air on the planet, beating out Mumbai and Guangzhou. The record temperatures in Siberia this year mean the city may not get any respite this summer, with the forest fire season forecast to start in late June, a month ahead of usual.

Krasnoyarsk’s 1 million residents find themselves on the front lines of climate change, facing toxic levels of smog in winter, when coal-powered emissions peak, and in summer smoke from wildfires. The city is emblematic of the wider environmental catastrophe in Siberia, a region bigger than the U.S., where global warming is melting the permafrost and burning one of the world’s biggest forests — known as the Taiga in Russian.

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