Carbon From Australian Bushfires Approaching National Annual Emissions Total Of 540 Million Tons
The bushfires raging for months across Australia have devastated communities and wildlife, but they pose another major but less visible threat—this one to the global fight against climate change.
While the fires are made worse by climate change, they’re actually part of a disruptive and dangerous cycle: As trees and brush burn, they’re also releasing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, estimates that emissions from these few months of fires in Australia are nearing the country’s manmade carbon emissions for a full year, which are about 540 million tons. “The fires are an indication of the way that nature can make it harder for us to tackle climate change if we don’t act proactively,” he says.
As a result of the fires, smoke has plunged major cities in Australia (and even New Zealand) into darkness, with air quality in Melbourne becoming the worst in the world on Monday. Emissions have reached as far as South America, according to Mark Parrington, the senior scientist for the atmospheric monitoring service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts—all of which will also have devastating consequences for public health. Australia needs to cut its emissions by 695 million tons over the next decade to meet its global climate commitment to limit its emissions to 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 (a target it could very well miss).
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But beyond releasing carbon into the atmosphere, the worsening fires in Australia and elsewhere jeopardize valuable natural carbon sinks by burning up trees and vegetation and degrading soil that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This all will make it harder to reign in emissions on the global scale moving forward. “A place like Australia doesn’t have the carbon stock that by [itself] are large enough to be a major concern,” Field says. “But if we see the same kind of feedback loop in forests in Brazil and Indonesia, or wide areas of the subtropic or the boreal forest like Canada’s and Russia’s, then we could really run into serious problems with this vicious cycle.”
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/australia-fire-emissions-global-climate-change/
