“…Despite that ban, stubble burning is still widespread across the entire former USSR (McCarty et al, 2017). In Kazakhstan, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, governmental law enforcement was particularly poor in the 1990s (Holmes, 2009;Semukhina, 2018), when we find the strongest increase in fire intensity on cropland (Table III- 2). Finally, we observed fewer fires around settlements than around former livestock stations (Figure SM III-9), probably due to higher fire suppression and fire management (in early stages of fires) close to settlements.…”