A wildfire burning for more than a week in drought-stricken Iran has razed portions of the ancient Hyrcanian Forests, a UNESCO World Heritage site home to many endangered species.
On Sunday, Turkey sent aircraft at Iran’s request to help battle the blaze in one of the world’s oldest forests, according to Iranian state media. The local authorities said they had managed to contain most of the fire, which they have been battling in the country’s north.
Iran has been plagued by a string of worsening environmental, political and economic crises this year.
The country is grappling with its worst drought in more than 60 years, with water resources in the capital, Tehran, and its second-largest city, Mashhad, nearly depleted.
The government is also still recovering from a 12-day war in June, in which strikes by Israel and the United States battered its nuclear and military facilities. And Iran is sinking deeper into economic crisis after a failure to reach a new agreement to limit its nuclear program prompted the reinstatement of U.N. economic sanctions.
The wildfire tore through a part of the forest in Mazandaran Province, and a local natural resources protection unit told state media on Sunday that firefighters had contained 80 percent of the fire. The blaze is believed to be man-made and spread rapidly in the drought-stricken province, according to state media.
The Hyrcanian Forests, which blanket a strip of mountains and coastline along the Caspian Sea between Azerbaijan and Iran, have origins that date back 25 to 50 million years, according to UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency. The woodlands are a critical habitat for many birds and mammals, including the endangered Persian leopard, and host many species of rare trees, some of them hundreds of years old.
“Hyrcanian Forests are among the oldest and most biodiverse ecosystems across the globe,” said Mojtaba Sadegh, a climate and wildfire expert at Boise State University. Such a blaze in late autumn, he said, points to the “increasing vulnerability of Hyrcanian Forests to intense fire activity” even beyond the hottest summer months.
Iranians are increasingly anxious over the compounding effect of climate change in the country.
Iran, according to climate experts, is warming faster than the global average, and temperatures this summer repeatedly soared up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Poor water and agricultural management have aggravated the effects of climate change, according to policy experts.
Water shortages have been so severe that supplies in the capital have been rationed for weeks, and officials have called on the population to pray for rain.
As firefighters were containing the blaze in the Hyrcanian Forests, another fire in a different area erupted in a forest near the city of Jolfa in northwestern Iran, state media said.
Satellite imagery from NASA suggests that nearly 1,500 acres of the Hyrcanian Forests have burned in the fire, which has stoked an uproar among some Iranians, who took to social media to criticize the government for what they said was a very slow response in working to preserve a national treasure.
“We cannot let government negligence and indifference destroy any more of Iran’s national heritage,” Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian activist and a Nobel laureate, wrote on X.
She urged the United Nations and other international agencies to support local environmental activists battling the blaze.
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