Massive wildfires that burned more than 4% of Canada’s forests last year released more greenhouse gases than all but three of the world’s countries in just five months, a study has shown.
The study published in Nature late last month found that the 2023 Canadian forest fires released 647 million metric tonnes of carbon – four times Canada’s annual fossil fuel emissions and similar to India’s annual figures.
Only China, which emits about 3.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon a year, and the United States (1.4 billion metric tonnes) released significantly more greenhouse gases than the fires, with India’s emissions described as “comparable” in the study.
Russia and Japan, the world’s fourth and fifth largest fossil fuel emitters, release less carbon combined than the fires did in 2023 every year, and all EU countries put together only emit slightly more annually.
The NASA-funded study found that Canada’s 2023 summer was the hottest and driest since at least 1980, leading to fires that burned an area roughly the size of North Dakota between May and September.
The area burned was more than eight times the 40-year average, and consumed more than 4% of Canada’s forests, from British Colombia and Quebec to the Atlantic provinces.
Lead author Brendan Byrne from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said: “What we found was that the fire emissions were bigger than anything in the record for Canada.
“We wanted to understand why.
“Some climate models project that the temperatures we experienced last year will become the norm by the 2050s. The warming, coupled with lack of moisture, is likely to trigger fire activity in the future.”
Header image: An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed wildfire smoke from Nova Scotia billowing over the Atlantic Ocean in May 2023. Credit: NASA
