A report says around 16 football pitches of trees per minute were lost to wildfires in 2021.
allows researchers to distinguish between trees lost to fires, and those destroyed for agriculture, logging or during intentional burns.In 2021, the second worst year for fires on record, an area the size of Portugal was lost."It's roughly twice what it was just 20 years ago. It is kind of astonishing just how much fire activity has increased over such a short amount of time."
While fire is a natural part of how these forests have long functioned, the scale of destruction seen in Russia in 2021 was unprecedented."What's most concerning is that fires are becoming more frequent, more severe and have the potential to unlock a lot of the carbon that's stored in soils there," said James MacCarthy.
"Climate change is increasing the risk of hotter, faster and larger fires," said Dr Doug Morton, who's chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Nasa.In other parts of the world, the impact of deforestation is also leading to more fires., the losses due to agricultural clearing and logging are having a knock-on effect.
While many of the trees that burn down will grow back over a period of 100 years or so, there are significant associated impacts of these losses on biodiversity, on water quality and soil erosion.