On the southern French Atlantic coast, the fire brigade is still fighting the flames. Forest fires release enormous amounts of stored carbon dioxide into the climate. In a global comparison, however, France’s forest fire emissions are low.
The ongoing forest fires in France are releasing record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, according to satellite data. The fires in the Gironde region in the south-west of the country released almost a million tons of CO2 from June to August, according to the European satellite environment observatory CAMS. That roughly corresponds to the annual emissions of 790,000 cars.
In the past two decades, around 300,000 tons of CO2 have been released by fires in France on average per year. The only year to match this summer’s record in France was 2003 – the year satellite monitoring was first used. At that time, wildfires under intense summer heat and drought would have released around 650,000 tons of carbon between June and August.
France’s emissions are fundamentally “manageable” compared to global wildfire emissions, said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at CAMS. Last year, heat and drought-related fires released 1.76 billion tons of carbon worldwide.
