British Columbia’s second-largest single wildfire in recorded history is rapidly gobbling up hundreds of thousands of hectares of forested land in the province’s northeast, but it’s not just the size of the burn that makes fire experts nervous, it’s the extreme temperatures inside of it.
Burning out of control through more than 500,000 hectares of boreal forest between Fort Nelson and Fort St. John, the Donnie Creek wildfire is being fed by dense fuel and dry conditions, both of which promise a hot blaze.
And that matters, says B.C. wildland fire ecologist Robert Gray. The higher the temperature a fire burns at, the more energy it releases and the more carbon it emits into the atmosphere. Werner Kurz, who leads the development of a National Forest Carbon Accounting System for Canada, says the Donnie Creek blaze has likely already let off over 77 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions, based on the Taiga Plains ecozone where it’s located and emissions averages from Natural Resources Canada.
Although wildfire scientists say a certain amount of burning is vital to reducing dangerous fuel loads and promoting regrowth, this extreme level of carbon release is unsustainable and increasingly a problem as climate change progresses and fire seasons intensify.
Mr. Gray describes the situation as a rapidly worsening feedback loop, wherein climate change creates hotter, dryer conditions, which spur more severe wildfire seasons, which in turn produce greater amounts of carbon, which then contribute right back into climate change.
The gravity of the issue is fairly new. For as far back as we know, forests have successfully self-regulated carbon emissions, with the amount released from wildfires balanced out by the plant life spurred in subsequent years. However, Canada’s forests haven’t absorbed as much as they’ve released for several decades now, according to the country’s annual greenhouse-gas (GHG) inventory reports.
In 2021, the most recent year reported by Environment and Climate Change Canada, wildfires in the country’s managed forest areas (98 per cent of total forests) produced 293 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, together known as carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions. During the same period, forests only removed 540,000 tons of said emissions. The resulting 292 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions released into the atmosphere is equivalent to about 40 per cent of Canada’s GHG emissions from every other source that year.
The amount is striking, but isn’t a type of emission Canada has to include in its GHG reports to the United Nations. Despite being increasingly exacerbated by human activity, wildfires are still considered a natural disturbance and Canada chooses to keep them off the official record.
“It’s voodoo accounting,” Mr. Gray says. Regardless of how natural wildfire emissions are, he adds, their contribution to climate change is threatening.
And the trend of a net positive carbon release is likely here to stay if serious action isn’t taken, says Carolyn Smyth, a scientist at Natural Resources Canada and colleague of Mr. Gray and Dr. Kurz’s at the Pacific Institute For Climate Solutions.
Question for the site. The IEA report on CO2 emission for 2022 stated that there was a net increase of 321 MT of CO2. Am I reading this right, the Canadian Wild Fires will add another 292 MT of CO2 just by themselves?
The Canadian MT CO2 numbers apply to 2021.
The IEA report for 2022:
https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
An excerpt from Peter’s capture of the Peak article (which has since been removed from their website, replaced by various “now largest in BC history” stories):
In 2021, the most recent year reported by Environment and Climate Change Canada, wildfires in the country’s managed forest areas (98 per cent of total forests) produced 293 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, together known as carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions. During the same period, forests only removed 540,000 tons of said emissions. The resulting 292 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions released into the atmosphere is equivalent to about 40 per cent of Canada’s GHG emissions from every other source that year.
The climate is changing so quickly that when I see the bare forest floor ashes in some of the pictures I think of these areas as just coming back at a different Köppen climate classification and skipping any pesky “transition” stage. In a sense, these forest-eradicating wildfires are the transition.