Huge blazes from the north-east of Russia to North America have made global carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires this year the highest in nearly two decades of modern satellite records.
“By many metrics, it has been an extraordinary fire season in many parts of the northern hemisphere,” says at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“We’ve seen big areas of fires before,” says at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, “but for two months at a time, that’s not something we’ve seen so much of in the data.”
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This year started quietly for wildfires and looked to be following the trend of recent years, which have seen a global decline in their number, driven largely by land management changes in Africa, South America and Australia. That changed in July. While images of an anguished woman near a fire in Greece of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on 9 August, 2021’s staggering wildfire CO2 emissions are largely due to blazes that took hold in July across a remote part of Russia.
A heatwave has seen fires sweep across the boreal forests of Sakha in Siberia. The province’s capital city, Yakutsk, has been . By mid-August, the CO2 released by Sakha’s fires – a good proxy of how much vegetation has been burned – was more than double the previous high for June to August, according to Parrington’s satellite data. Fortunately, the fires now appear to be past their peak.
The band of fire in the sub-Arctic region stands in contrast to the big story of the past two years, when heatwaves led to record fires in the Arctic itself, where fuel is usually too cold to burn.
“Wherever that heatwave seems to land each year, we’re seeing a huge amount of fire activity,” says at the London School of Economics. “That’s inevitably down to higher temperatures leading to the drying of fuels faster.”
The overlap with striking fires and extreme heat is also playing out elsewhere, says Swain. Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, along with British Columbia in Canada, are all seeing major wildfires in the wake of record-shattering heat. In July, Canada’s national temperature record was broken by nearly 5°C. “The temperatures, and therefore how extremely dry the vegetation has become, really are the big story here,” says Swain.
This year’s North American wildfires have also been striking for starting early, and being particularly intense and fast-moving, he adds.
The recent heatwave that set the stage for this year’s fires in the US and Canada would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to an international team of researchers. “Climate change is making everything drier and more flammable,” says Swain.
The Mediterranean has also had a remarkable year of fires, linked to high temperatures including a provisional European record of 48.8°C in Italy. Turkey and Greece have both been hard hit. This week there has been a big fire to the west of Madrid, and smaller ones in Portugal and Montenegro. Nonetheless, the relatively small amount of biomass burned means the Mediterranean’s contribution to global wildfire CO2 has been dwarfed by those in Sakha and North America.
Figures compiled by Parrington show that wildfires this year have released a total of 4.3 gigatonnes of CO2 up to 16 August, more than that .
Meanwhile, smoke from fires in the western US and Canada last month not only caused problems locally, but raising air pollution to harmful levels there, too.
“The air quality impacts of smoke on human and animal health is really important,” says at Miami University in Ohio. “Instead of summer season, it’s smoke season.” She fears for people in largely rural regions such as Sakha, who may be exposed to smoke due to their reliance on being outdoors in the summer to hunt and farm.
In order to mitigate future fires, we will have to better manage the amount of fuel available, says McCarty, by using controlled fires to periodically reduce vegetation. Education is also vital. In the US, are started by people.
Exactly how bad 2021 will be remains to be seen, and will hinge on the Amazon, which saw major fires in 2019. Parrington has already detected signs of wildfires starting in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. “Given there are political difficulties in Brazil, it is unlikely it’ll be a low fire year in that region,” says McCarty.
