The 2020 California wildfire season, in which more than 9,000 total fires scorched 4% of the state’s 110 million acres, is proving to be more devastating than previously realized. According to a recent study in the journal ScienceDirect, emissions from those fires may have knocked out 18 years of carbon dioxide reductions. Researchers found that between 2003 and 2020, the state eliminated 65 million metric tons of emissions. The 2020 fire season emitted nearly twice that, releasing 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
“A lot of the hard-earned gains to fight climate change could be wiped out if we don’t start changing the way that we manage the forests, manage the interface between human activity and the wildland-urban interface,” study lead author Michael Jerrett told the Los Angeles Times. “[We must] really start tracking these emissions more carefully and comparing them with other major sources so that we don’t unwittingly think that we’re meeting our climate goals when we’re not.”
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Jerrett is an environmental health sciences professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and has spent his career diligently researching the impact of emissions, from how traffic affects humans to how we can better monitor air pollution exposure. He and the study’s authors are pushing for wildfire emissions monitoring—something California will finally undertake as part of its overall emissions tracking in keeping with guidance from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Researchers are also pushing for changes in forest management policies “focused on fire suppression rather than on preventive measures such as mechanical clearing and prescribed burning activities also likely increases the risk of large, destructive wildfires,” they write. California doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and researchers acknowledge that the historic 2020 state wildfire season does have global implications.
Though 2021 was a less severe year, wildfires elsewhere in the world emitted the equivalent of half of the E.U.’s annual emissions, according to Bloomberg. The latest IPCC report calls for a suite of solutions to mitigate wildfires, including controlled burns, injecting particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight, and using crop residues for bioenergy. These varied solutions show that, though there are many factors that ignite and worsen wildfires, there are also quite a few ways to address those risks.
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