• Wildfires exacerbating climate change: Yale Climate Connections

Intense wildfires can endanger lives, destroy homes, cause hazardous air quality hundreds of miles away, and contribute to global warming.

When trees and plants burn, they emit carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases.

Kelley: “Those emissions can have quite a large impact on the climate.”

That’s Douglas Kelley, a fire scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

He says last year, massive wildfires in Canada raged across huge areas of forest.

In a recent study, Kelley and his team found that because of their size and intensity, those fires produced about nine times more carbon pollution than Canadian wildfires produce in an average year.

After a fire, some carbon gets reabsorbed as trees and plants regrow. But when fires are so massive, much more is released than can be reabsorbed.

So as the climate warms, there’s potential for a vicious cycle. Climate change makes intense fires more likely by bringing hotter, drier conditions. Those extreme fires in turn become a growing source of carbon pollution …

Kelley: “And might actually drive more climate change in the future, which might mean we see more of these fires as well.”

… putting forests, and people, at risk.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media