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North Korea to Welcome Russian Tourists, the Country's First since the Pandemic, Report Says

Russian and North Korean flags fly at the Vostochny Сosmodrome, the venue of the meeting between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, September 13, 2023. Sputnik/Artem Geodakyan/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Russian and North Korean flags fly at the Vostochny Сosmodrome, the venue of the meeting between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, September 13, 2023. Sputnik/Artem Geodakyan/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
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North Korea to Welcome Russian Tourists, the Country's First since the Pandemic, Report Says

Russian and North Korean flags fly at the Vostochny Сosmodrome, the venue of the meeting between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, September 13, 2023. Sputnik/Artem Geodakyan/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Russian and North Korean flags fly at the Vostochny Сosmodrome, the venue of the meeting between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, September 13, 2023. Sputnik/Artem Geodakyan/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Russian tourists reportedly going on a ski trip to North Korea will be the first international travelers to visit the country since its borders closed in 2020 amid the global pandemic lockdown.
The report, published Wednesday by the Russian state-run Tass news agency, underscores deepening cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang. It also follows the meeting last September between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East, The Associated Press said.
Tass did not specify a timeframe but the report brought some surprise to Asia observers who had expected the first post-pandemic tourists to North Korea to come from China, the North’s biggest diplomatic ally and economic pipeline.
According to Tass, an unspecified number of tourists from Russia's far eastern region of Primorye will first fly to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where they will visit monuments such as the “Tower of Juche Idea,” named after the North’s guiding philosophy of “juche” or self-reliance.
The tourists will then travel on to the North’s Masik Pass on the east coast, where the country’s most modern ski resort is located, Tass said. It said the trip was arranged under an agreement reached between Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of the Primorye region, and North Korean authorities.
Kozhemyako traveled to Pyongyang in December for talks on boosting economic ties as part of a flurry of bilateral exchanges since the Kim-Putin summit. Ahead of the trip, he told Russian media he expected to discuss tourism, agriculture and trade cooperation.
The Kim-Putin summit deepened outside belief that North Korea is supplying conventional arms to Russia for its war in Ukraine, in return for high-tech Russian weapons technologies.
The White House said last week that it has evidence Russia fired additional North Korea-provided missiles at Ukraine. The United States, South Korea, Japan and others issued a joint statement condemning the missile's transfer.
North Korea and Russia are locked in separate confrontations with the United States and its allies — North Korea for its advancing nuclear program and Russia for its protracted war with Ukraine.
North Korea has been slowly easing pandemic-era curbs and opening its international borders as part of its efforts to revive its economy devastated by the lockdown and persistent US-led sanctions. Its reputation also suffered a blow in August 2022, when Pyongyang made a highly dubious claim that it had beaten a domestic COVID-19 outbreak.
“For North Korea, tourism is the easiest way to earn foreign currency under the international sanctions regime,” said Koh Yu-hwan, former president of Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification.
Koh said he expects Pyongyang to eventually also open North Korea to Chinese tourists.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said "visitors from Russia are unlikely to be as financially lucrative for North Korea as the return of more numerous visitors from China.”
“But the domestic political risk is relatively low while providing symbolism of revitalized relations with Moscow in line with Pyongyang’s current geopolitical narrative,” he added.

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Canada’s 2023 Wildfires Burned Huge Chunks of Forest, Spewing Far More Heat-Trapping Gas Than Planes 

The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
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Canada’s 2023 Wildfires Burned Huge Chunks of Forest, Spewing Far More Heat-Trapping Gas Than Planes 

The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.

Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday's Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.

The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It's about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year, based on US Environmental Protection Agency data.

Forests “remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere and that gets stored in their branches, their trunks, their leaves and kind of in the ground as well. So, when they burn all the carbon that's stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI's Global Forest Watch.

When and if trees grow back much of that can be recovered, MacCarthy said, adding “it definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023.”

MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 square miles (77,574 square kilometers), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it's closer to 6%, MacCarthy's figures show.

These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.

“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn't part of the study.

“Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum, so that there is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming.”

It's more than just adding to heat-trapping gases and losing forests, there were health consequences as well, Tyukavina said.

“Because of these catastrophic fires, air quality in populated areas and cities was affected last year,” she said, mentioning New York City's smog-choked summer. More than 200 communities with about 232,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to another not-yet-published or peer-reviewed study by Canadian forest and fire experts.

One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.

“The 2023 fire season in Canada was (an) exceptional year in any time period,” Flannigan, who wasn't part of the WRI study, said in an email. “I expect more fire in our future, but years like 2023 will be rare.”

Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada's big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote.

The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MaCarthy said.

There's short-term variability within trends, so it's hard to blame one specific year and area burned on climate change and geographic factors play a role, still “there is no doubt that climate change is the principal driver of the global increases in wildfire,” Bendix said in an email.

With the world warming from climate change, Tyukavina said, “the catastrophic years are probably going to be happening more often and we are going to see those spikier years more often.”