Extreme blazes drive rise in CO₂ fire emissions

Rampant wildfires in the Americas led to a surge in global greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires in the year through February, a new study showed on Thursday, warning that climate change is fanning the flames.

Inferno that devastated vast areas of Canada boreal forest and swept through the dry forests and vulnerable wetlands of South America, causing a global CO fire.₂ emissions are 10% above the 20-year average, the state of the wildfires report says.

This is despite the fact that the total number of areas burned worldwide is below average, an international team of researchers reported.

Heat, drought and human activity have contributed to intensifying fires in particularly carbon-rich forests and ecosystems, the report said.

“The scale and frequency of these extreme events is what is most stunning to me,” said co-author Matthew Jones from the University of East Anglia in eastern England.

He said satellite monitoring showed fires were becoming more intense around the world, spreading to key ecosystems and burning more materials than in the past.

“During these extreme forest fire Over the years we have seen more fires, larger fires, hotter fires and faster fires, and all of these properties combine to have an extremely destructive impact on people and nature,” Jones told AFP.

Climate change is one of the key factors helping to create optimal hot and dry conditions for fire to spread and burn.

The report, which looked at severe wildfires from March 2024 to February 2025, found that destructive infernos in Los Angeles and parts of South America are two to three times more likely due to climate change.

According to the authors, warming caused the area burned during these events to increase by 25 to 35 times.

Global temperatures in 2024 were the highest on record, exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.

Last year, flames tore through millions of hectares of forests and farmland in Canada, the western United States and the Amazon, as well as the Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay.

Globally, wildfires killed 100 people in Nepal, 34 in South Africa and 31 in Los Angeles during the reporting period, the authors said, with smoke spreading across continents and causing dangerous levels of air pollution far from the heat of the flames.

The report says fires release more than eight billion tons of CO worldwide.₂ in the period 2024-2025 – about 10% above the average since 2003.

It comes after the World Meteorological Organization warned on Wednesday that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year was the largest on record.

The WMO has expressed “serious concern” that land and oceans are becoming unable to absorb CO2.₂leaving greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

He warned that the planet could witness a so-called “vicious cycle” of climate feedback, in which increased greenhouse gas emissions contribute to higher temperatures, fueling wildfires that release more CO2.₂while warmer oceans cannot absorb as much CO₂ from the air.

© 2025 AFP