Wildfires pushed Canada into world’s top four CO2 emitters in 2023

Record wildfires in 2023 pushed Canada into the world’s top four greenhouse gas-emitting countries that year. This is evident from a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

In 2023, wildfires burned about 15 million hectares – about four percent of Canada’s total forest area – and more than 200,000 people had to be evacuated. The wildfires made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year.

Fourth place in the ranking

“Forests remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, which gets stored in their branches, trunks, leaves, and in the ground. So when they burn, all the carbon stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI’s Global Forest Watch.

Researchers determined that 2,371 megatons of CO2 were released, pushing Canada from eleventh to fourth place in the ranking of the largest CO2 emitters. This puts Canada behind China, the United States, and India for 2023.

Hot and dry weather

Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated that the wildfires spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year and about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year.

The researchers warn that the hot, dry weather responsible for those blazes is forecast to become the norm by the 2050s and is “likely to drive an increase in fire activity”.

Carbon sinks

A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires, and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” one of the scientists said. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 2.2° C warmer than normal, and some parts of Canada were 8° to 10° C hotter than average in May and June.

“This raises concerns about whether potentially more frequent and intense fires in the coming decades will suppress the ability of Canadian forests to continue serving as carbon sinks,” Brendan Byrne, lead author of the study, told AFP.

Beloved tourist town destroyed

Canada has agreed under the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. According to government data, Canada’s total CO2-equivalent emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2022 were 708 megatons.

This year’s wildfire situation in Canada has been more subdued but still calamitous in some parts. In July, the beloved tourist town of Jasper in the western part of the country was partially destroyed.