As the world burns more, the Arctic biome is refusing more carbon Premium

Increasing wildfires globally release massive carbon emissions, impacting natural carbon sinks and contributing to global warming.

Multiple states in the U.S. were recently in the grip of tornadoes, wildfires, and dust storms. The fires that scorched parts of Texas and Oklahoma burnt through almost 300 homes, reliving the horrors a similar blaze inflicted on Los Angeles in January this year. The fires that raged across Eaton and Palisades in particular claimed at least 28 lives, destroyed more than 14,000 structures, and forced people to evacuate en masse.

The inferno engulfed at least 16,000 hectares of land, destroying various natural ecosystems, per state agency Cal Fire. In fact, Cal Fire said it was among the most destructive fires in California history.

Almost a month later, across the Pacific Ocean, another wildfire swept through the forests near Ofunato city in Japan. According to media reports, the fire had started burning in the mountainous region surrounding the city on February 26. It claimed the life of at least one person, damaged close to 210 buildings, and forced more than 4,200 residents in the area to evacuate. In all, the fire covered nearly 2,900 hectares of land, rendering it one of the largest fires Japan has suffered in the last five decades.

All these fires also released large quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. According to the Copernicus Air Monitoring Service (CAMS) of the European Union, wildfires released 800,000 tonnes of carbon in January 2025 alone and that this was nearly four-times the amount wildfires released in the same period a decade ago. CAMS also examined the fires’ radiative power — i.e. the amount of heat they radiated, measured in watts — as recorded by NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites (which also track farm fires in India in winter). It found that this power exceeded the long-term average power between 2003 and 2024 by one order of magnitude.

According to the latest India State of Forest Report published on December 21, 2024, Uttarakhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh recorded the most fires in that year. Uttarakhand alone recorded 5,315 forest fires between November 2022 and June 2023. However, the report also said the number of fire ‘hotspots’ in the country seems to be dropping: from 2.23 lakh in 2021-2022 and 2.12 lakh in 2022-2023 to 2.03 lakh in 2023-2024.

At the same time, India has been experiencing some of its highest land temperatures in recent years. In 2023, researchers at IIT-Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, reported that in India’s northwest, northeast, and central regions, land temperature is rising 0.1º-0.3º C per decade in the pre-monsoon season and 0.2º–0.4º C per decade in the post-monsoon season.

Heat waves have also been found to be occurring earlier in the year, moving slower, and lasting longer. Together with prolonged dry spells, they create conditions ripe for wildfires. Suryaprabha Sadasivan, senior vice-president of consulting firm Chase India, wrote in The Hinduon February 12 that forest fires in India emit around 69 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.