Fire logged as 593 in central Quebec Province, Canada on July 21, 2023. /CFP
Wildfires raging across Canada, made more intense by global warming, have broken records by releasing over one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) as of July, Chinese scientists said Thursday.
"The greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide generated by forest fires in Canada have imposed a non-negligible impact on global warming and have developed into a global environmental event," said Liu Zhihua, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Applied Ecology.
Liu said his research and analysis, which is based on scientific models using remote sensing data, shows that greenhouse gases from the burnt forest had caused the emissions.
Remote sensing technology is currently an effective means of estimating carbon emissions from large-scale forest fires, according to Liu. The greenhouse effect from methane and nitrous oxide generated by the Canadian forest fire is equivalent to about 110 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and that's on top of the one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide cast off by wild fires, he added.
Together, that more than 1.1 billion tonnes of CO2 emission from the wildfires so far is twice the amount of the total energy related CO2 emission in Canada in 2021 alone.
In a column that Liu wrote to CGTN earlier in July, he had predicted that the CO2 emission would surpass one billion tonnes.
"It's quite astonishing," he said.
As of Thursday, firefighters had battled with 4,818 cases of blazes in 2023 alone, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), and the total area burned had exceeded 12.2 million hectares.
An interactive map from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), captured on July 28, 2023. /CIFFC
An ecological disaster
In addition, air pollutants such as PM2.5, PM10, aerosols, and black carbon from Canadian wildfires do not stay in one place. For example, the movement of pollutants has caused the worst pollution weather in New York City since 1960 and had topped Chicago's air quality index standard by 5.6 times on June 27.
And these pollutants go further than shared border areas thanks to the westerly circulation and weather dynamics, according to Wang Zhe from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics under CAS, who's also on the research project with Liu.
The pollutants had traveled to Scandinavia in Europe on May 25, spread to Iceland and Greenland on June 8, and reached the European continent on June 26. These pollutant accounted for more than 5 μg of PM2.5 per cubic meter in Europe from June 27 to 30. They've also reached North Africa and Asia, according to Wang.
"The Canadian wildfire is indeed a global environmental event. And as it is still ongoing, its final impact will definitely be much more serious than the existing data," Wang said.
The loss of plantation and biodiversity, the exposure of soil, and the transmission of pollutants to Arctic areas will cause a complicated impact to global ecosystem that requires further comprehensive analysis in the future, Wang added.
"We need to notice that the wildfire events occurs more frequently nowadays, which has exceeded the scope of a natural change that the European and American countries had long believed in. Rather, they have become a kind of destructive ecological disaster," Liu said.
China's solutions
Despite facing severe natural and social challenges, China has made significant progress in forest and grassland fire prevention. The comprehensive capacity for fire prevention and control has significantly improved, and forest fire incidents in 2021 and 2022 remained at historically low levels.
In May, China issued the "Opinions on Comprehensively Strengthening Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Control under New Circumstances," demonstrating the determination of the country to mitigate major forest and grassland fire risks and ensure the safety of people's lives, property, and ecosystems. Now, China's "prevention-oriented, combined prevention and suppression" approach is offering beneficial lessons for the world. (CGTN)
A study led by AN Zhisheng from the Institute of Earth Environment revealed a linkage between glacial cycles and inland Asian high-intensity wildfire events by analyzing high-resolution soot deposition over the last 2.6 million years.
The Canadian wildfires have brought severe impact to Canada and even the North American region. In addition to endangering the lives and property of local residents, the ecological damage and the emission of greenhouse gases caused by the wildfires have had an immeasurable impact on the human living environment.
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