Canada’s Wildfires and Their Unfortunate Effect on the Climate

In 2023, intense wildfires ripped through Canada’s boreal forests on a massive scale, burning more than seven times the average annual area than the previous four decades. This makes Canada’s 2023 wildfire season the most destructive one ever recorded. More than 6,000 fires set light to 15 million hectares of land (larger than the size of England), far exceeding the usual 2.5 million hectares. Furthermore, the fires produced a massive amount of planet-warming carbon emissions. 

The damage from these emissions surpassed the burning of fossil fuels in every country except for China, India, and the United States. This raises concerns about the damage the forests will sustain in the future from their absorption of carbon, forcing scientists to recalculate how much more greenhouse gas humans can emit into the atmosphere without exceeding current global temperature targets. 

Since climate change is what affects the increasing intensity and likelihood of such extreme fires, a worryingly accelerated cycle is set into motion which makes it tougher for experts to truly gauge what to expect in long-term damage. Jonathan Boucher, one of the Canadian Forest Service’s scientists, highlights the necessity of regularly revising climate models to reflect the ongoing shifts in weather patterns to assess the ongoing damage. He says, "For instance, this summer’s record temperatures and low humidity in Quebec was extreme by today’s standards. But they could be the norm by the end of the century.”

The 362 million hectares of forests in Canada are a valuable carbon sink that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, slowing the pace of climate warming. The forests help to slow climate change by storing carbon as the trees grow. However, if forest fire activity continues to increase, these forests' carbon uptake capacity will be dangerously suppressed. If the forests cannot absorb carbon, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere instead. Beyond the clear immediate societal impacts of evacuations and poor air quality affecting millions of Canadians, the true impacts of carbon emissions from the fires remain unclear. Scientists predict that fires of this magnitude will become common in the 2050s on our current global warming trajectory, though the average person may be thinking it will be sooner than that, at this rate.

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On top of that, there is currently a sizable gap between the emissions reported by countries and those directly measured in the atmosphere. This discrepancy is partly due to countries only being required to report anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions, which follows UN guidelines to track progress toward limiting global temperature rise. Countries can categorize lands as “managed” or “unmanaged” to differentiate between natural emissions and human-caused emissions, but the definition of “managed land” is ambiguous. Within these guidelines, it is not necessarily clear how to account for emissions from natural disturbances within these areas. Since countries may have different understandings of these definitions, inconsistent reporting arises. For instance, Canada excludes all wildfire-related emissions in its “managed” lands from its official reporting with their focus being on anthropogenic emissions, such as timber harvesting. 

This approach has been questioned by the UN, among others, such as the reviewers of the inventory Canada submitted in 2021. The reviewers observed that Canada did not supply sufficient evidence to support their assumption that all emissions and removals from stand-replacing fires in managed forests are non-anthropogenic. This is a significant issue, considering that excluding wildfire emissions in managed forests in Canada may underestimate its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 million tons annually.

Scientists will have to rethink exactly how much carbon humans can emit into the atmosphere without warming the planet beyond the global warming limit that was set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Canada is warming at a rate that is twice the global average due to its large land mass, so scientists will need to keep a close eye on just how quickly this interference of the forests’ natural carbon cycle will escalate.