The calculations have always been approximate, because it depends on the type of forest and their age. Some forests will also regenerate less quickly than others: this is the case with boreal forests. However, in a search published on October 18 in the magazine Sciencewe read that a type of boreal forest has practically tripled its annual CO2 emissions between 2001 and 2023, due to more frequent fires.
Globally, carbon emissions from all wildfires increased by 60% during this same period.
Subscribe to our newsletter!
So you don’t miss any scientific news and know everything about our efforts to fight against fake news and disinformation!
If we go back to the end of the 20th century, the biggest contributors in this area were rather the humid forests of the Amazon or the Congo, because these were burned to expand agricultural land or for logging purposes. . But the increase in fires that we are talking about in the last decade is indeed due to hotter and drier conditions, which increase the risks.
In theory, the researchers note, any forest can adapt to hotter, drier conditions. But it takes time, and boreal forests have not had enough time to adapt to ongoing climate change. “ These regions are not used to today’s climate », summarizes the main author, the British geographer Matthew Jones.
The motivation behind this research, as behind all those that have attempted to calculate the contribution of forest fires to carbon emissions, is to mitigate this impact. Of course, we cannot prevent the fact that the hotter and drier the weather, the more fires there will be, but we can, researchers hope, target the regions most at risk and adapt local strategies accordingly – slow down. the expansion of agricultural land, regenerating a forest with a certain species of tree, etc.
This is all the more important since, as any biologist knows, the most intense of these fires do not only burn trees, but part of the vegetation and soil, thus leading to even more trees being lost, lack of organic material capable of facilitating a rapid return of biodiversity.
