Climate change will make the 2023 wildfire season significantly worse

Climate change will make the 2023 wildfire season significantly worse

Chelsea Harvey & E&E News

Climate Wire Between March 2023 and February 2024, wildfires burned 1.5 million square miles of land around the world, releasing 8.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Scientists say climate change is also contributing to the destruction.

The worst wildfires on record in Canada have burned about 58,000 square miles, 40 percent of the area they would have burned without global warming, and the dry, windy weather that sparked them has become at least three times more likely because of climate change.

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Last year, Greece saw the worst wildfires in European history, and climate change has increased the area burned by 18%, making the country at least twice as likely to experience wildfires.

Climate change has also increased the area burned in the western Amazon rainforest by 50 percent and made fire-prone weather events at least 20 times more likely.

That’s according to a new report on last year’s global wildfire season, published Wednesday by a consortium of research organisations including the UK Met Office, the University of East Anglia, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. This is the first edition of a series of annual reports.

“Over the last year, we have seen wildfires kill people, destroy homes and infrastructure, cause mass evacuations, upend livelihoods and destroy vital ecosystems,” Matthew Jones, a researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the report, said in a statement. “As the climate warms, wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense, and both society and the environment are suffering the consequences.”

The new report looked at wildfires around the world, using satellite observations and models to monitor the amount of area burned and estimate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. It found that emissions from wildfires last year were 16 percent higher than normal and would likely have been the highest on record if not for a quieter-than-usual fire season in grassland savannas around the world.

North America experienced a particularly severe season last year, accounting for about a quarter of global fire emissions, according to the report, with much of that CO2 coming from record-breaking fires in Canada, where emissions were about nine times higher than average.

The report also highlights some of the most extreme regional examples from the past season, including Canada, Greece and the Amazon, which all experienced record-breaking seasons.

The Canadian fires have burned six times the area they normally burn, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and killing at least eight firefighters. The Greek Mount Evros fire, which broke out in August 2023 near the Turkish border, was the largest fire ever recorded in continental Europe, burning an area larger than New York City and killing at least 20 people.

Meanwhile, much of South America experienced less fire activity than normal, except in parts of the Brazilian Amazon and nearby areas of Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia, where fire numbers hit record highs. Chile also saw its deadliest fires on record in February 2024, when wildfires ravaged the Valparaiso region, killing more than 100 people.

According to the report, wildfires are known to be highly complex phenomena, heavily influenced by both climatic factors and human activities. The research team concluded that in Canada and Greece, large wildfires could have been even worse without human land-use drivers, such as agriculture, forest management and fragmentation of natural landscapes. In both regions, severe fire weather and large amounts of dry fuels were the biggest risk factors.

Meanwhile, in the Amazon, human activities, including widespread deforestation, likely exacerbated the fires. Severe drought and extreme heat, intensified in part by an unusually strong El Niño weather event, were also factors last season.

But in all three locations, the researchers found that climate change has exacerbated the hot, dry conditions that helped the fires spread — and these conditions will get worse as global temperatures continue to rise.

The researchers used a specialized climate model to explore how regional fire seasons will change as the planet warms, and found that Canada, Greece and the Amazon are significantly more likely to experience fire seasons as severe as last year’s, even under moderate future climate change scenarios.

But strong climate action could make a difference, the report adds: Benign future scenarios could significantly reduce the risk of such an event occurring in the coming decades, assuming humanity quickly curbs greenhouse gas emissions.

Reprinted from E&E News Posted with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News delivers news that matters to energy and environmental professionals.