Chinese experts call for accountability over wildfire emissions, but US scientist says blame game ‘makes no sense’

John Fasullo, a scientist at the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research, said it “makes no sense” to penalise specific countries for fire-related emissions through national accounting mechanisms.

Increases in wildfires “are often the result of the emissions from other nations”, he said.

Chinese scientists calculate mammoth emissions from Canadian wildfires

The CAS scientists said climate warming and a subsequent increase in fire-prone weather was amplified at northern latitudes.

This means countries such as Canada, which experienced an unprecedented wildfire season this year, could be especially vulnerable to worsening fires that are not the result of their own carbon emissions.

From 2001 to 2022, a total of 1.03 billion hectares (2.55 billion acres) of forest burned globally, releasing 33.9 billion tonnes (37.4 billion tons) of carbon dioxide into the air, making wildfires “an important source of current carbon emissions”, according to the CAS report.

During this period, the average forest area that burned in wildfires each year was 11 times the area of new forests planted annually.

Extreme wildfires, which have been exacerbated by climate change and human activity, are “seriously weakening the carbon sink function of the ecosystem”, the report said.

According to a special report released in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations, it is difficult to separate the direct human effects on wildfires from natural ones.

This means that countries are not obliged to account for wildfire-related emissions when reporting to the UN panel, though some such as Australia choose to report their emissions from wildfires.

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According to Zhu Jiaojun, a contributor to the CAS report and director of the CAS Institute of Applied Ecology, wildfires need combustible material and a source of fire to occur. These two factors are “partly controllable”, he said in an interview with state-owned news service CGTN.

Zhu said if we consider forest fires a natural disaster, it is “the most human-controllable disaster”.

Fasullo said studies had shown that despite year-to-year variations, human-induced climate change was leading to long-term increases in fire size and intensity as well as fire season length.

Because of these trends, the CAS scientists called for the inclusion of wildfire emissions in carbon accounting, as well as international cooperation to establish better forest and fire management practices.

The more frequent occurrence of “extreme wildfires” – defined as those that cover very large areas or have a concentrated impact – is the main driver behind increases in wildfire-related emissions, the report said.

This includes the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires, the Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020 and this year’s Canadian wildfires.

Earlier this year, wildfires in Canada released over 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – more than the total emissions from fires recorded in the country from 2001 to 2022, according to the CAS report.

This is higher than Japan’s total emissions from fossil fuels in 2021, the report said.

Canada’s fire season began early this year, with severe drought conditions and abnormally high temperatures starting in March, creating the perfect conditions for fire to spread rapidly, according to the report.

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Wang Yuhang, an atmospheric sciences professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told the journal Nature that he agreed with the CAS scientists’ suggestion that countries should include wildfire-related carbon emissions in their national monitoring and reporting plans.

“Global fire carbon emissions are expected to double, highlighting the emergence of fire as a more significant carbon source at short timescales in the future,” Wang said.

According to the CAS report, China’s wildfire and related emissions have fallen due to better forest management focused on prevention, especially with regard to early detection and control.

However, as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, China has contributed to the growing trend in fires at northern latitude.

Fasullo said if the system to account for wildfire emissions was an international one, it could be a “useful effort”.

Wildfires are one of the “invisible” emissions that are largely excluded from global greenhouse gas accounting, which “undermines climate mitigation”, according to a paper by Leehi Yona, a PhD candidate at Stanford University.

“The wider the deficit between accounted-for and actual [greenhouse gas] emissions, the less effective climate policies will be,” Yona wrote.

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To address global wildfire emissions, the CAS scientists outlined three recommendations.

The first is to establish a carbon accounting system that takes into account all carbon emissions from natural processes, including forest fires, along with emissions from human activity.

The recommendation also calls for establishing comprehensive emissions monitoring, risk prevention and emissions control systems, and including forest fire emissions in forest carbon sink trading, which involves trading carbon credits and planting new trees to offset fire-related emissions.

Their second recommendation is to strengthen the management and prevention of extreme forest fires, including managing combustible materials through measures such as clearing and dredging, controlled burning and creating firebreaks.

Their third recommendation is to deepen international scientific research and cooperation on managing forest fire emissions, including improving fire risk identification and early warning systems, prevention equipment, and methods for post-disaster reconstruction and restoration of carbon sinks.

Through international cooperation, the scientists hope to establish unified standards and accurate emissions measurement and assessments systems for forest fires, as predicting, controlling and preventing fires is a “global problem”, the report said.

“There is still a lack of a standard accounting system for carbon emissions from forest fires. We hope to launch an international big science project and establish a more flexible and higher-resolution global fire database,” Zhu told the Science Times, a Chinese-language news site.

“Wildfire is just one of several feedbacks in the carbon cycle to anthropogenic climate change,” Fasullo said.

“But given that they are feedbacks, they should not be included in accounting.”

South China Morning Post