Canadian wildfire emissions hit record high as smoke reaches Europe
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Wildfires burning through large swathes of eastern and western Canada have released a record 160 million tonnes of carbon, the EU’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service said on Tuesday.
This year’s wildfire season is the worst on record in Canada, with some 76,000 square kilometres (29,000 square miles) burning across eastern and western Canada. That’s greater than the combined area burned in 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2022, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
As of June 26, the annual emissions from the fires are now the largest for Canada since satellite monitoring began in 2003, surpassing 2014 at 140 million tonnes.
“The difference is eastern Canada fires driving this growth in the emissions more than just western Canada,” said Copernicus senior scientist Mark Parrington. Emissions from just Alberta and British Columbia, he said, are far from setting any record.
Scientists are especially concerned about what Canada’s fires are putting into the atmosphere — and the air we breathe.
The carbon they have released is roughly equivalent to Indonesia’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
