by Gloria Dickie
LONDON (Reuters) – Multiple wildfires this summer in France have already released record amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, satellite data shows.
The fires released nearly a million tonnes of CO2 between June and August, according to the latest estimates from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Program (CAMS).
This represents the annual emissions of 790,000 cars.
Over the past two decades, forest fires have emitted on average in France around 300,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
The only year comparable with 2022 is 2003, marked by a long heat wave and extreme summer temperatures. The fires then released between June and August 650,000 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Spain also saw record CO2 emissions from forest fires during the mid-July heat wave, according to a CAMS report published in July. On the other hand, the forest fires in Portugal resulted in lower emissions than in previous years.
According to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), more than 60,000 hectares have burned so far in France this year, six times the annual average from 2006 to 2021.
(Report Gloria Dickie in London; French version Dagmarah Mackos, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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