(NewsNation) — All the airplanes flying all over the world in 2022 produced just one-quarter of the three billion tons of carbon emissions that came from 2023’s wildfires in the forests of Canada, according to a new study.
Researchers from the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch initiative and the University of Maryland counted more than 19 million acres of forest burned by last year’s Canadian fires. The fires accounted for about one-quarter of all the trees lost to fires around the world in 2023.
High temperatures and below-average rainfall contributed to the unusually huge fire devastation in Canada, but similar fire seasons may soon be the norm, according to WRI. A recent analysis shows that forest fires are burning nearly twice as many trees these days as they did 20 years ago.
WRI’s describes the growing “fires-climate feedback loop.”
“In … northern latitudes, land surface temperatures are warming at rates roughly double the global average,” the report says. “Higher temperatures caused by climate change dry out the landscape and make forests more susceptible to fire, driving longer fire seasons and larger forest fires. As larger forested areas burn, more carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, further exacerbating climate change.”
Besides the fires themselves, a parallel problem in the fight against global warming is how countries record and report fires, and which ones are considered contributing to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada, for example, only reports human-caused emission to track its progress in limiting the Earth’s temperature rise. But last year’s Canadian wildfires were mostly natural. Canada also doesn’t report wildfire-related emissions coming from “managed” lands, instead focusing on human-caused fires and timber harvesting.
Canada’s own research says that while humans start about half the country’s fires, they account for just 20% of the land that’s burned each year.
The WRI report says the full impact of Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season reveals a lesson for all countries: “Fighting forest fires — and accurately accounting for their emissions — are critical measures for overcoming the world’s growing climate crisis.”
