Canadian wildfires emit more than 1 billion tons of CO2

Wildfires, made more intense by global warming, raged across Canada and set a record by emitting more than a billion tonnes of CO2 through July.

Wildfire in Quebec province, Canada, July 21, 2023. Photo: CFP

"Greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide released from the Canadian wildfires have an undeniable impact on global warming," Liu Zhihua, a researcher at the Institute of Applied Ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was quoted as saying by CGTN on July 28.

Liu uses scientific models with remote sensing data to study and analyze greenhouse gases from burned forests. According to him, remote sensing technology is now an effective way to estimate carbon emissions from large-scale wildfires.

The greenhouse effect from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the Canadian wildfires is equivalent to 110 million tonnes of CO2. The CO2 from this event alone is one billion tonnes. In total, more than 1.1 billion tonnes of CO2 have been emitted from the wildfires to date, more than double Canada’s total energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021.

In 2023, as of July 27, firefighters had fought 4,818 fires and the total area burned exceeded 12.2 million hectares, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).

Air pollutants like PM2.5, PM10, aerosols, and soot from Canadian wildfires don’t stay in one place. For example, the movement of pollutants led to New York City’s worst pollution since 1960, exceeding Chicago’s air quality index standards by 5.6 times on June 27.

The pollutants traveled beyond the border region due to westerly wind circulation and weather dynamics, according to Wang Zhe of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the CAS, who worked on the research project with Liu. They reached Scandinavia on May 25, spread to Iceland and Greenland on June 8, and entered mainland Europe on June 26. They also reached North Africa and Asia, Wang said.

“The Canadian wildfires are truly a global environmental event. And since it’s still ongoing, the ultimate impact will definitely be much more severe than the data currently available suggests,” Wang said.

Thu Thao (According to CGTN )

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