The devastating Canadian wildfires of last year were fueled by climate change and fueled climate change right back. The fires emitted more heat-trapping carbon dioxide than did India in burning fossil fuels, according to a study update published Thursday in Global Change Biology. "The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was," per the AP. The 3.28 billion tons of carbon dioxide sent into the air was comparable to the emissions of 647 million cars in a typical year and nearly four times the emissions of airplanes, per the outlet.
The fires burned through 29,951 square miles of forest, an area the size of West Virginia, per the research. "It definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023," said lead study author James MacCarthy of WRI's Global Forest Watch. The carbon all those trees had taken from the atmosphere and stored was "released back into the atmosphere," MacCarthy said. "Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum," said Syracuse University researcher Jacob Bendix, who wasn't part of the study. "So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming."
The report is important because Canada "excludes wildfire-related emissions in its managed forests from its reported emissions," per Axios. The update notes the nearly 30,000 square miles burned is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. As a result, Canada was home to 27% of global tree cover loss in 2023, compared to 6% in a typical year. MacCarthy and report coauthor Alexandra Tyukavina of the University of Maryland tell Axios the best way to respond is to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. Adding to the urgency: a yet-to-be published study by Canadian forest and fire experts finds twice as much land burned as Thursday's update claims. (More wildfires stories.)
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