Canada’s 2023 wildfires created four times more emissions than planes did last year – report
Months-long fires spewed about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, data shows
Associated Press
Thu 27 Jun 2024 17.55 CEST
Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than the US state of West Virginia, new research has found.
Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28bn tons (2.98 metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday’s Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.
The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It’s about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, based on US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data.
