The thousands of historic forest fires in Canada alone have emitted, this year, the equivalent of more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide, unprecedented, estimated Friday, August 11 the Canadian authorities. This is almost in line with the annual emissions of Japan (the equivalent of 1.12 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2021), the world's fifth largest polluter, and more than the annual emissions of the entire global aviation sector in 2022 (nearly 0.8 billion tonnes of CO2).
"This summer has turned into a marathon," Michael Norton, executive director of the Canadian Forest Service, said Friday, as Western Canada prepares to go through another heat wave. "Our preliminary estimates indicate that emissions this season exceeded one billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent." And the risk of fire is still expected to be "above normal" until September, he added. By the end of July, carbon emissions from fires in Canada were already more than double the previous annual record set in 2014, according to data from the European Copernicus Observatory.