Canada produced 23% of global wildfire carbon emissions for 2023: report

Canada was responsible for roughly 23 per cent of global wildfire carbon emissions in 2023, a new report has found.

Copernicus, the Earth observation component of the European Union’s space program, revealed in a report on Tuesday the country’s historic wildfire season resulted in about 480 megatonnes of carbon being produced.

That is “23 per cent of the total global wildfire carbon emissions for 2023. The global annual total estimated fire emissions (as of Dec. 10) is 2,100 megatonnes of carbon,” the organization said.

“The wildfires that Canada experienced during 2023 have generated the highest carbon emissions on record for this country by a wide margin.”

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With roughly 18.5 million hectares of land burned, 2023 was the worst wildfire season ever recorded in Canada. It cooked the previous record of 7.6 million hectares scorched in 1989.

The impact was felt right across the country: British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, the Northwest Territories and Quebec saw heavy and intense wildfires throughout their regions.

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While they burned, their smoke spread not only throughout Canada, but the world.

It prompted numerous air quality warnings, spread to cities in the United States, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean into parts of Europe.

Mark Parrington, a senior scientist in the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said the wildfires burned at a level never before seen in their data records.

“The impacts of North American air quality, and the fact that Europe could experience hazy skies as a result of these fires, gives a clear indication of their significance,” he said.

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While Canada headlined the Copernicus report, other regions were also mentioned.

The historically wildfire-sensitive Mediterranean region in Europe, particularly Greece, experienced devastating wildfires in July and August.

The fires in Rhodes in July and around the Evros region, close to the Turkish border, and then of East Macedonia and Thrace in August, had significant impacts on area communities. The combined wildfire carbon emissions for July and August were the third largest on record followed by 2007 and 2021, at about two megatonnes of carbon.

The wildfires in Spain, on the border between Aragon and Valencia, and in Asturias, at the end of March, were the country’s first large forest fires of the year, resulting in the highest emissions for the month in Copernicus’ data set.

In August, the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands experienced the highest carbon emissions since 2003.

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Copernicus added in its report that the relationship between climate change and wildfires is “complex.”

“The emissions from wildfires are not one of the main drivers behind the increase of concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, but the increase in temperature associated with higher levels of these gases does increase the likelihood of wildfires,” it said.

“As heatwaves become more common, in combination with long-standing drought conditions, the likelihood of experiencing unprecedented wildfires as those experienced in Canada is higher. Therefore, the constant monitoring of the evolution of wildfire emissions is key to assess and mitigate their impact on air quality and human health.”