Devastating wildfires led to record-high emissions this summer

Blazes in the Mediterranean basin, North America and Siberia resulted in the highest level of carbon emissions from wildfires ever recorded during summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

The fires released a record 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in July and 1.4 billion tons in August, according to a report by Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus. Just under a third of the emissions came from blazes in Russia. 

"While the local weather conditions play a role in the actual fire behavior, climate change is helping provide the ideal environments for wildfires,” said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the ECMWF Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. "What stood out as unusual was the number of fires, the size of the areas in which they were burning, their intensity and also their persistence.”