Inferno on Earth: Wildfires Spreading as Temperatures Rise

Farther north, Alaska’s and Canada’s boreal forests recently have experienced more-frequent fires, releasing enough carbon to transform them in some years from net absorbers to net emitters. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the total area burned more than doubled.  Higher temperatures have extended the range of the tree-damaging spruce budworm into new territory and allowed spruce beetles, no longer delayed by cold winters, to complete their typical two-year life cycle in just a single year. Drought has limited the efficacy of the trees’ defenses. Together the insects and the drought are leaving millions of acres of dead wood in their wake, providing fuel for wildfires. Overall, a warmer climate is predicted to double the area burned in northern Canada by 2100; in Alaska, the area could double by as early as 2050.

In other parts of the world fire regimes are changing and are projected to change even more as the planet heats up. Over much of Europe fire frequency decreased during most of the twentieth century, and expanding forests soaked up carbon.  Now, however, some areas may be starting to see more fires. Between 2000 and 2006, some 50,000 fires burned each year in the Mediterranean region, compared with 30,000 a year in the 1980s, though the total area burned did not increase, in part because of more vigilant firefighting.

During Europe’s record 2003 heat wave, which killed over 50,000 people, an estimated 650,000 hectares of forest burned continent-wide. Although the number of fires during this warm and dry year was not particularly high, the area burned was a record. More than 5 percent of Portugal’s forest area burned, four times the 1980–2004 annual average, resulting in economic damages exceeding 1 billion euros. If future warming is not kept in check, hot and dry summers like 2003 could happen as frequently as every other year, dramatically increasing wildfire risk.

For Southeast Asia, the extreme 1997–98 El Niño brought a major drought to the region, allowing some of the most severe fires in recent history to burn in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Fires set to clear land jumped from grasslands and shrublands to logged forests and peat swamps, where they burned underground. For months Southeast Asian skies were hazy from smoke. Nearly 10 million hectares burned in Indonesia alone, affecting 23 of 27 provinces and costing more than $9 billion.

During that same El Niño, more than 20 million hectares burned in Latin America, wreaking damages of up to $15 billion. In 2001 the following El Niño brought more drought and put a frightening one third of Amazon forests at risk of burning. With a temperature rise of more than 3 degrees Celsius—well within the range projected for this century barring rapid and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions—much of South America is likely to see more frequent wildfires.

Just as a weakened immune system leaves a person vulnerable to otherwise innocuous germs, the combination of logging, road construction, and intentional burning to clear forests for cattle ranches, farms, and plantations has fragmented the world’s tropical forests, increasing their vulnerability to fire. Piling higher temperatures on top of such stresses could completely undermine forests’ resilience. For the massive Amazon rainforest, we risk reaching a tipping point where recurrent droughts dry out the landscape enough so that small fires can turn into devastating conflagrations.

We all rely on trees to soak up greenhouse gases and store carbon. If large swaths of forest go up in flames, it could set into motion a vicious cycle, where more wildfires in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Stabilizing climate, and doing so quickly, takes on a new urgency when it means averting an inferno on earth.

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Janet Larsen is the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute.

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