CO2 Released From Boreal Forest Fires Usually 10% Of Wildfire CO2 Output; In 2021, It was +/- 25%
Carbon emissions from wildfires in boreal forests, the earth’s largest land biome and a significant carbon sink, spiked higher in 2021 than in any of the last 20 years, according to new research. Boreal forests, which cover northern latitudes in parts of North America, Europe and Asia usually account for about 10 percent of carbon dioxide released annually by wildfires, but in 2021 were the source of nearly a quarter of those emissions.
Overall, wildfire emissions are increasing. In 2021, however, fires in boreal forests spewed an “abnormally vast amount of carbon,” releasing 150 percent of their annual average from the preceding two decades, the study published earlier this month in the journal Science said. That’s twice what global aviation emitted that year, said author Steven Davis, a professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, in a press release.
Wildfire emissions feed into a detrimental climate feedback loop, according to the study’s authors, with the greenhouse gases they add to the atmosphere contributing to climate change, which fosters conditions for more frequent and extreme wildfires. “The boreal region is so important because it contains such a huge amount of carbon,” said Yang Chen, an assistant researcher at UC Irvine and one of the study’s authors. “The fire impact on this carbon releasing could be very significant.”
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Overall, boreal forests have “profound importance for the global climate,” said Jennifer Skene, a natural climate solutions policy manager with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program. “The boreal forest actually stores twice as much carbon per acre as tropical forests, locked up in its soils and in its vegetation. The Canadian boreal alone stores twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves. So this is an incredibly vital forest for ensuring a climate-safe future.” Most of the carbon that boreal forests sequester is in the soil, as plants slowly decompose in cold temperatures, said Skene. As wildfires burn, they release carbon stored in the soil, peat and vegetation. In 2019, research funded in part by NASA suggested that as fires increase, boreal forests could lose their carbon sink status as they release “legacy carbon” that the forest kept stored through past fires.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22032023/boreal-forest-wildfire-emissions/
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