Bushfires release over half of Australia’s annual CO2 emissions
SEOUL: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country’s annual carbon dioxide emissions in another setback to the fight against climate change.
Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tonnes of CO2 since August 1, which is more than half of Australia’s total greenhouse gas footprint last year, according to Niels Andela, an assistant research scientist at
NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and collaborator with the Global Fire Emissions Database. That compares with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service’s estimate of 270 million tonnes in just over four months.
Destructive blazes have erupted in 2019 from the Arctic to the Amazon and Indonesia in what scientists are calling an exceptional year for wildfires. As places like Australia grapple with extreme weather conditions such as severe droughts and frequent heatwaves - often aggravated by climate change - they’re likely to suffer from more persistent and ferocious fires that will typically start earlier and last longer. “We have been closely monitoring the intensity of the fires and the smoke they emit and when comparing the results with the average from a 17-year period, they are very unusual in number and intensity, especially in New South Wales, for being so early in the fire season,” said Mark Parrington, a scientist at Copernicus.