World Resources Institute – Released Nearly 4 Times More Carbon than Global Aviation– “Canada’s 2023 wildfires made international headlines, causing billions of dollars in property damage, displacing thousands of people from their homes, and spewing air pollution that traveled as far as Europe and China. A new analysis shows that the wildfires also had a massive effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers from WRI’s Global Forest Watch initiative and the University of Maryland find that wildfires burned roughly 7.8 million hectares of forests in Canada in 2023 — making up 45% of all land that burned in Canada that year and more than 6 times the annual average since 2001. This amount of tree cover loss produced roughly 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — nearly 4 times the carbon emissions of the global aviation sector in 2022, and 25% more than from all tropical primary forest loss combined in 2023. Unlike emissions from tropical deforestation, which involve a permanent change in land use, most of the carbon emitted from wildfires will eventually be recovered by Canada’s forests over time as they regrow. However, it will take these forests decades to re-absorb all the carbon dioxide that was emitted in just a single year; meanwhile, time is in short supply to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.”