translated from Spanish: Forest fires: Climate change and deforestation increase global risk

After months of extreme heat and drought in Australia, the fires finally arrived. Australia experiences wildfires every year. But this year they are particularly extreme, and summer in the southern hemisphere has just begun.
According to the preliminary assessment of the fires, eight million hectares have been destroyed by flames so far. Twenty-five people and millions of animals have died. Entire regions have run out of power and clouds of smoke now cover half of the continent.

Dozens of fires ravage the Australian landscape. Millions of animals and 25 people have died so far.
But Australia isn’t the only place on fire. In 2019, the Global Forest Watch Fires (GFW Fires) online platform counted more than 4.5 million fires worldwide that were greater than one square kilometer. That’s a total of 400,000 more fires than in 2018.

“The number of fires and their size vary from year to year, but the big trend is that the fire risk is increasing globally,” DW Susanne Winter, WWF Forest Program Manager in Germany, told DW.
The reasons why fires begin and are established in principle are complex. But experts are now pointing to a connection between the growing number of fires and warmer ocean temperatures as a result of climate change.
Warmer seas act as fire accelerators
Man-made greenhouse gases have raised the Earth’s average temperature by an estimated degree of Celsius since the 19th century. The sea surface has also been heated by 0.8 degrees Celsius. The warmer the ocean becomes, the less energy and CO2 the atmosphere is able to absorb and store water.
“The ocean is like the air conditioning of the planet,” explains Karen Wiltshire, deputy director of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research.

Strong winds drive fire deeper and deeper into the mountain. It’s almost impossible to extinguish the fires at this point.
The consequences of this could be devastating. If the sea continues to warm, it will have a huge impact on the climate, from extreme temperatures, storms and droughts to floods and late rainy seasons that disrupt ecosystems.

When strong winds rip away warm, dry landscapes like Australia, the risk of wildfires increases significantly. But the risk is also growing in regions that were once warm and fresh.
Even the Arctic is on fire
In addition to large fires in Europe and California, forest fires also occurred in the Arctic in 2019. “The kind of fires we’ve never seen before,” says Clare Nullis of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The fire meets the ice. The clearly visible burn scar from one of the many forest fires in Siberia in 2019.
Alaska experienced record temperatures of up to 32 degrees Celsius, creating fire conditions. According to WMO, we can expect to see forests burn in the northern hemisphere as never before in the last 10,000 years.

In Alberta, northern Canada, hundreds of fires burned over 800,000 hectares of land over months in the summer of 2019. According to estimates by the Russian authorities, around 9 million hectares of forest were burned in Siberia, an area larger than all of Portugal. Toxic smoke settled over towns and cities.

Columns of Siberian fire smoke in July 2019 drifting hundreds of miles west from the east.

Humans are to blame for the forest fire
Fires are actually a natural process in the regeneration and renewal of ecosystems. However, 96% of the world’s fires are now being deliberately caused or unintentionally caused by humans. Only 4 percent of fires occur naturally, for example, due to lightning strikes, according to a WWF report.
Many areas are cleaned using the logging and burning method to make way for agriculture, livestock or industry, particularly in the Amazon region. Also in Indonesia, more than 27 million hectares of forest have been destroyed since 1990 for the paper and palm oil industries.

Africa
Data from Global Forest Watch Fires shows that many fires affect Africa, from South Sudan to West Africa. Experts say high population density has led to increasingly intensive use of natural resources, meaning ecosystems have less and less time to recover. And fires are also becoming more common.
“The main reason for this is the widespread use of roaming crops,” Winter explains. “Landowners and farmers use fire to clear their fields, so as to quickly dispose of vegetation and make soil fertile in the short term.” Some of these fires can get out of control and cause larger wildfires.
The Amazon
Last year there were more fires in South America than in 2010. Large areas of forests were cut for agriculture in the Amazon region in 2019. “These weren’t natural causes,” Nullis says. “Forest fires in Brazil are politically motivated. Of course, we can’t compare them to fires in Africa,” Winter added.
Between January and November 2019, more than 80% of forests were destroyed compared to the previous year. Thirty years ago, the Amazon was still as wet as fires as we see today would not have been possible, Winter says. However, the Amazon is becoming increasingly dry thanks to the increasing logging.

More wildfires create a feedback loop: released CO2 fuels climate change, which in turn increases the risk of more fires.

Climate change and the fire cycle
Deforestation, climate change and the risk of wildfires are directly related. “We’re dealing with a feedback effect,” Winter says. “More deforestation means an increase in climate change, which increases the chances of vegetation dry out, which in turn increases the risk of fire.”

The 2019 Amazon fires were devastating. Across South America, more fires have occurred compared to 2010.

And fires continue to increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. According to Greenpeace, around 8 billion tons of CO2 are released each year. This is about half of the emissions caused by burning coal worldwide.
Wildfires in Australia have already released half the amount of CO2 the continent would normally produce for a year. And the smoke is now spreading across the Pacific into Argentina and Chile.

Original source in Spanish

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