Canada wildfires emitted more carbon than most countries last year

So many trees burned during Canada’s wildfires last year that the forest emitted more carbon than most countries’ fossil fuel emissions for 2022, a new study found.

So many trees burned during Canada’s historic wildfire season last year that the forest emitted more carbon than most countries’ fossil fuel emissions for 2022, according to research published Wednesday. 

“Only China, the U.S. and India release more on an annual basis than we saw 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 Nature, estimates that the emissions from the fires — around 647 megatons of carbon — were more than four times Canada’s annual output from fossil fuel use. Nearly 4% of Canada’s forests burned in 2023, the study says. 

Canada’s forests have typically absorbed more carbon than they’ve released. But the new findings highlight the unsettling possibility that forests we’ve relied upon as sinks to absorb carbon are increasingly doing the opposite: adding to emissions that are already too high. It raises questions about how reliable these carbon sinks will be in the future as wildfire patterns shift. 

“2023 was really this exceptional year for heat drought and fire emissions,” Byrne said. “Around the 2050s, these are projected to be kind of normal summer temperatures for Canadian forests, and that suggests that we may be moving towards conditions where fire events like these become much more common, and that could potentially have big impacts on how much carbon these forests are able to store.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/canada-wildfires-carbon-emissions-rcna168320

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