WASHINGTON — In 2021, wildfires ravaged the world’s carbon-rich snow-capped forests.
That year, the burning of boreal forests released 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, researchers reported March 2 during a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the advancement of science.
This is a new record for the region, which stores around a third of the world’s terrestrial carbon. “It’s also about double the emissions from aviation that year,” said Earth System Scientist Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine. The trend, if it continues, threatens to make the fight against climate change even more difficult.
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Boreal forests are part of the taiga, a vast region that surrounds the Earth just south of the Arctic Circle. Fires in tropical forests like the Amazon tend to attract more attention for their potential to contribute large amounts of global warming gases to the atmosphere (SN: 09/28/17). But scientists estimate that, per area, boreal forests store about twice as much carbon in their trees and soils as tropical forests.
Climate change is causing the taiga to warm up twice as fast as the world average. And the forest fires multiply more common in the regionreleasing more sequestered carbon, which in turn can worsen climate change (SN: 05/19/21).
Davis and his colleagues analyzed satellite data on carbon emissions from boreal regions from 2000 to 2021. In 2021, emissions from boreal forest fires accounted for a huge 23 percent of all CO2 emitted by forest fires worldwide, researchers report in the March 3 Science. On the other hand, the CO2 emissions in an average year from 2000 to 2021 were around 10%.
The record emissions coincided with widespread heat waves and droughts in Siberia and northern Canada, likely fueled by human-induced climate change.
There is no data yet to show whether 2022 has seen a similar increase in emissions. But, Davis said, “there’s not really a lot of evidence that this record will last for long.”