He fire has become strong in Australia, Canada or United States. This succession of increasingly serious and more extensive fires in the Northern Hemisphere has also carbon dioxide emissions skyrocketed. In just two decades, emissions from forest fires have grown 60% and they call into question some reforestation strategies against climate change, according to a new study published in ‘Science’.
Analysis from the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows a change in trend. The largest fire source It is no longer in the tropical forestssuch as those in the Amazon, where deforestation and agricultural uses have caused a decrease in ignitions. Now the main victims of the flames are in the forests of North America and Eurasia, where they have tripled between 2001 and 2023.
«Surprising changes are taking place in the global fire geographywhich are mainly explained by the increasing impacts of climate change on the world’s boreal forests,” says the study’s lead author, Matthew Jones. The global increase in temperatures has generated extraordinary conditions for fire in these forests, with heat waves, lower soil humidity and greater productivity of the vegetation, which serves as fuel.
To demonstrate that not only the extension has grown but also that the intensity of the fire has been increasing, the authors calculated the burning rate of carbon, which shows the amount of carbon emitted per unit area burned. The figures reflect an increase of almost 50% in forests around the world.
Climate strategy
Forests are considered ‘carbon stores’ and are an asset, through reforestation, in the fight against climate change. They capture carbon dioxide, ‘take’ it out of the atmosphere and retain it in the earth, thereby preventing the gases from overheating the planet. Therefore, the study points out, detecting the global increase in fires “is a warning of the growing vulnerability of forest carbon reserves” and poses “a great challenge” in the fight against climate change.
Ultimately, the success of these climate plans depends on carbon being stored in forests permanently, but fires release that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Today the fires in these extratropical regions like North America are already emitting 500 million more tons of CO2 than two decades ago.
“Our work shows that fires are increasingly occurring where we don’t want them to occur: in forests, where they pose the greatest threat to people and vital carbon stores,” says Jones.
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