Wildfires turn Canada’s vast forests from carbon sink into super-emitter
- Media Manager
- Sep 21, 2023
- 1 min read
The Guardian
Written By: Leyland Cecco
Published: September 22nd, 2023
The vast swaths of pine, spruce and larch forest that blanket much of Canada have been prized for generations. Not only do they provide a home to hundreds of species – including some of the most threatened in the country – but they also absorb more greenhouse gases than they emit, acting as a huge carbon sink.
This summer, however, as flames devoured one of the largest contiguous stretches of woodland on the planet, 2bn tonnes (2.2bn tons) of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere.
Emissions from Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season are probably triple the country’s annual carbon footprint, experts warn, as climate systems reach a “tipping point”. The trajectory of the country’s wildfires has raised questions about how Canada can better tackle the blazes – and whether the issue is a global problem as nations race to reduce the volume of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
Werner Kurz, a recently retired scientist with Natural Resources Canada, estimates nearly 2bn tonnes of carbon have already been released into the atmosphere from the record-breaking wildfire season, which federal officials warn could persist into the winter.
“It’s definitely off the scale,” said Kurz, a key figure in developing tools to measure the “carbon budget” of the country’s forests.
The figure far exceeds all of the emissions tied to Canada’s economy each year, which emit a total of 670m tonnes. Even emissions from burning in the managed forests, which refers to any part of the country’s hinterland that is logged or stewarded through the park system, has exceeded the total of Canada’s economy, with an estimated 850m tonnes emitted.
