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So many trees burned during Canada’s historic wildfire season last year that the forest will emit more carbon than most countries’ fossil fuel emissions by 2022, according to research released Wednesday.
“Only China, the United States and India release more on an annual basis than we’ve seen from these fires,” said Brendan Byrne, a carbon cycle scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. in California and the lead author of the new study. “These fire emissions were unprecedented in the Canadian record.”
Byrne’s research, published in the journal Natureestimates that the emissions from the fires – around 647 megatons of carbon – were more than four times the annual production of Canada from the use of fossil fuels. Almost 4% of Canada’s forests will burn by 2023, study says.
Canada’s forests have typically absorbed more carbon than they have released. But the new findings highlight the disturbing possibility that the forests we rely on as sinks to absorb carbon are increasingly doing the opposite: adding to emissions that are already too high. It raises questions about the reliability of these carbon sinks in the future to the change in fire patterns.
“2023 has really been an exceptional year for drought heat and fire emissions,” Byrne said. “Around the 2050s, these are expected to be kind of normal summer temperatures for Canadian forests, and this suggests that we may be heading towards conditions where fire events like these become much more common, and that could have a big impact on the amount of carbon these forests are able to store.”
Last year, more than 232,000 people were evacuated due to wildfires in Canada, and the smoke caused the worst season of smoke exposure in modern US history. Cities like New York have been overtaken by air pollution.
To estimate the total carbon emissions from the fires for the season, the researchers used satellite data that evaluates the amount of light absorbed by carbon in the atmosphere. They also analyzed the summer weather and found that Canada has dealt with exceptional drought and its hottest summer since at least 1980. Scientists expect such conditions to become more common.
When human activity causes the emission of carbon into the atmosphere, about half of it remains there, while a quarter is absorbed by the ocean. The rest is absorbed by the earth’s biosphere – the trees of the planet and other plants.
“The concern here is that if you have changes in the frequency and intensity of fires, then maybe it won’t happen as much,” Byrne said. “How these forests change in their ability to store carbon has pretty significant implications for how much carbon we can emit into the world.”
Canada’s timberlands represent about 8.5% of the globe’s forests, according to the new study.
The researchers’ emissions estimates closely match other scientists’ analysis of the 2023 fires in Canada. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, a satellite observation program of the European Union, estimated last year that the fires. produced about 480 megatons of coalbased on an analysis that used a different method.
Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus, said the new research produced similar results to the Copernicus study and included additional satellite information that helped reduce uncertainty.
Although smoke from Canada’s wildfires this season has not had as significant an impact on the United States as it did last year, Parrington said they will again emit high amounts of carbon.
“Monitoring of this year’s fires shows that, after 2023, 2024 is already the second highest fire year in the last two decades for Canada in terms of estimated emissions,” Parrington he said in an email.
