‘Nothing left to burn’: Wildfires blaze through the Arctic

Fires engulfing boreal forests and tundra are releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the carbon-rich organic soil. Arctic wildfires that sparked above the 66th parallel north unleashed an estimated 16 million tonnes of carbon in 2021 – roughly equal to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of Peru – according to a report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Though the charred boreal forests and tundra still represent just three percent of the global area burned each year, the richness of their soils means those wildfires account for roughly 15 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions from fires — and that number is growing. An analysis of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service’s Global Fire Assimilation System found high-latitude wildfires were responsible for a greater share of total global fire emissions in 2021 than in any year since monitoring began in 2003, releasing nearly one-third of last year’s total carbon emissions from wildfires. One study in April in the journal Science Advances projected that wildfires in North America’s boreal forests could end up releasing nearly 12 billion cumulative tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, equivalent to roughly one-third of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021.