Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Maps show where the Canadian wildfires are burning

Emily Mae Czachor
Updated Tue, June 27, 2023

Canada is experiencing its most destructive wildfire season on record, as hundreds of blazes burning from coast to coast continue to send tremendous plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. Thick bands of soot and smoke particles captured over the last month by satellite images showed the extent of the air pollution traveling south over the Canadian border and into the United States, producing hazy skies and triggering air quality alerts across the country.

Wildfire season typically happens around this time of year in Canada, which is home to about 9% of the world's forests. But with the season occurring annually from May until October, devastation seen from the outset this year put the country almost immediately on track for its worst season in more than 30 years. Out-of-control blazes have cropped up in nearly every corner of Canada and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

A map updated daily by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre shows how widespread the wildfires have become, although eastern provinces like Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia have been hit particularly hard this year by large and at times uncontrollable blazes. Officials on Tuesday reported the highest number of active fires in Quebec, with 117 blazes recorded. British Columbia, along Canada's west coast, had the second-highest number of active blazes — 99 — followed by Alberta and Ontario.


/ Credit: Natural Resources Canada

The spread — reaching from the westernmost provinces right across to the eastern ones — is unusual, particularly so early in the year, Canadian government officials have said. Political leaders, including President Joe Biden, and environmental experts acknowledge the causal link between rising temperatures driven by climate change, as well as drought, and the extreme wildfire season that Canada is experiencing now. Plus, as CBS News previously reported, harsh weather conditions in Canada are fueling the fires and making it harder for firefighters to combat the flames.


The interagency fire center has recorded 2,956 wildfires since the beginning of 2023. The fires have scorched at least 7.8 million hectares — or around 19.2 million acres — of land across Canada this year, according to the center. This acreage surpassed the amount of land burned in 1989, which previously held Canada's annual record, the country's National Forestry Database reported.


/ Credit: Natural Resources Canada

There were 490 active fires burning in Canada on Tuesday, according to the latest interagency tally, with two new blazes recorded since officials put out the previous day's update.

After wildfire smoke traveling south from eastern Canadian provinces brought a marked spell of fog, fumes and copper skies to the northeastern U.S. earlier in June, states being affected most severely this week are in the Midwest, with air quality in Chicago and Minneapolis ranked as the world's worst and second-worst on Tuesday, according to the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Meanwhile, NASA published an image Tuesday that showed a thick band of smoke from the wildfires in eastern Canada drifting across the Atlantic Ocean and reaching as far as Europe.

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires travels across the Atlantic Ocean and hovers over western Europe in this satellite image captured on June 27, 2023. / Credit: NASA MODIS

As of Tuesday, a majority of Canada's active fires were classified as "out of control," with 259 blazes fitting that distinction. The number was up slightly from the 250 fires marked as out of control by the agency 2 weeks ago. Of the remaining wildfires being monitored, 158 were marked "under control" and another 73 were "being held," which is the label assigned when a fire is not under control but also is not moving.

/ Credit: Fire Information Resource Management System for US/Canada

Canadian officials have declared a "national preparedness level 5" in response to the wildfires, which means the country will deploy any resources necessary to combat the flames. Mr. Biden said earlier this month that firefighters from the U.S. would be sent to Canada to assist in the effort, alongside others from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, a research officer from the Canadian Forest Office previously told CBS News.

New York Skies Set to Darken Again With Smoke From Canada Wildfires

Brian K. Sullivan and Laura Nahmias
Tue, June 27, 2023 


(Bloomberg) -- Smoke from Canadian wildfires will obscure the skies in New York and across the Mid-Atlantic starting Wednesday, just weeks after the blazes blanketed the region in a polluted haze.

Air quality could reach unhealthy levels in western and central New York Wednesday into Thursday, Governor Kathy Hochul said in a tweet. Alerts have already been posted for the area, including Buffalo, Ithaca, Syracuse and Binghamton, according to the National Weather Service.

While the potential intensity of the pollution wasn’t clear yet, Hochul said the smoke would start affecting New York City by Thursday.

“We’re expecting smoke and haze to come all across the state,” Hochul said in a press conference.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation said in a tweet that New Yorkers should be prepared for “possible elevated levels of fine particulate pollution caused by smoke on Wednesday June 28th.”

New York City and the Northeast had some of the worst air quality in the world earlier this month when smoke from Quebec forest fires swirled south, turning the skies over Manhattan an apocalyptic orange. The smog triggered flight delays and led to the cancellation of outdoor events.

“If you want to know the effects of climate change, you’re going to feel it tomorrow in real time,” Hochul said. “We are truly the first generation to feel the real effects of climate change, and we’re also the last generation to do anything meaningful about it.”

The smoke is currently bringing unhealthy air conditions to Chicago and other areas of the Midwest, according to AirNow.gov.

“It’s pretty bad in Chicago,” said Bryan Jackson, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Center. The city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said residents should consider wearing masks and limit outdoor activity.

A weather pattern that’s bringing thunderstorms and showers across the Northeast will move out of the region, causing winds to blow from north to south in coming days, Jackson said. This flow could channel the smoke from Canada’s fires south.

Large parts of Canada from coast to coast have been burning for weeks. Currently 257 fires were burning out of control across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires has reached Europe. Will it affect air quality?



Rebecca Ann Hughes
Tue, 27 June 2023

Canada is currently experiencing the worst wildfire season on record.

At least 75,000,00 hectares across the country have already burnt and there are still several months of peak wildfire season to come.

After covering the east coast of North America, clouds of smoke from the blazes have now drifted across the Atlantic to Europe.

Here’s how the smog has travelled and the effects it could have on the continent.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires has reached Europe

On Monday 26 June, smoke from Canada’s raging wildfires could be seen across western Europe using satellite imagery, the UK Met Office reports.

The smog travelled across the Atlantic Ocean via the jet stream - a fast flowing air current in the Earth’s atmosphere.

At the beginning of June, the smoke reached Norway and on Monday, it also arrived in the UK.

For the remainder of the week, the smoke will remain in the upper levels of the atmosphere over Europe, forecasts predict.

As the smoke enters the atmosphere at high altitudes, it is able to linger for longer and travel long distances.
Will the Canada wildfire smoke affect air quality in Europe?

Earlier this month, the wildfire smoke enveloped New York City in a hazardous orange haze.

Residents were advised to remain indoors as much as possible.

“This is detrimental to people’s health,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul warned.

But in Europe, the effects will not be the same. The smoke will not lead to any significant worsening of air quality for residents as it will remain in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

It could, however, lead to some picturesque scenes in our skies.

“Whilst the smoke is high up in the atmosphere, it may make for some vivid sunrises and sunsets in the next few days,” the Met Office wrote on Twitter.
Canada wildfires are the worst on record

In Canada, the blazes continue to rage across multiple provinces. On 26 June, there were 27 new wildfires, according to the National Fire Situation Report.

While air quality in Europe has not been affected, many areas of North America are seeing dangerous conditions.

In Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, the air quality was deemed as “high risk” over the weekend.

Residents experienced a slight reprieve on Monday thanks to stormy weather and wind changes, but the smoke is likely to return later in the week.

Air quality warnings have also been issued in the US including in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana.

“We’re seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change,” tweeted Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Canada travel warning: Everything you need to know about travelling during wildfires


Canada fires: Millions breathing hazardous air as smoke spreads south into US

“These fires are affecting everyday routines, lives and livelihoods, and our air quality. We’ll keep working - here at home and with partners around the world - to tackle climate change and address its impacts.”

Direct links between the wildfires in Canada this month and climate change have not been confirmed by scientists. But in general, the climate crisis is provoking more fire-inducing conditions.

A 2021 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that dry, windy and hot weather conditions, which increase the chances of fire taking hold, will become more common in some places, including Atlantic Canada and the US, as climate change worsens.


Canada’s Explosive Wildfires Have Damaged a Forest Carbon Offset Project

Natasha White and Zahra Hirji
Mon, June 26, 2023 

Canada’s Explosive Wildfires Have Damaged a Forest Carbon Offset Project


(Bloomberg) -- Canada’s explosive wildfire season has already pumped millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Some of that carbon is coming from vegetation burned at a carbon offset project, highlighting the fragility of a tool the world is relying on to fight catastrophic climate change.

With Canada facing what’s on track to be its worst wildfire season on record — and climate change fueling ever more destructive blazes — climate experts and offset developers are concerned it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.

On June 3, British Columbia fire officials spotted a blaze that has impacted the BigCoast Forest Climate Initiative project, according to Domenico Iannidinardo, senior vice president for forests and climate at Mosaic Forest Management Corporation, which runs the project.

“About 100 hectares of our 40,000 hectare project was involved in this fire,” or about 0.25% of the project, Iannidinardo told Bloomberg Green. That’s an area equivalent to roughly 140 football pitches worth of forest.

So far, little is known about how the fire will impact BigCoast’s carbon removal capacity or how much carbon has been released. Werner Kurz, senior research scientist in the Canadian Forest Service, said its emissions could be up to 32,250 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, depending on the fire’s severity. The impact is “clearly not trivial” for BigCoast or the local area, he said, but it’s a “rounding error” in terms of the climate impact of the wildfires that have ravaged the province.

As of June 23, crews had suppressed the fire so it was no longer spreading. Mosaic said that assessing the emissions from the area that was burned “will take some time.” They will be incorporated into future carbon accounting and be independently verified. Still, Iannidinardo described the “disturbance” as “negligible.”

Companies and countries are increasingly relying on carbon offsets to reach their emissions targets, a tool used in an attempt to compensate for their climate pollution by investing in projects that reduce or remove emissions elsewhere. But climate scientists and activists say the instruments, including those based on forests, aren’t generally effective at mitigating climate change, despite decades of experimentation and improvement. They point to forest fires — which are increasing in severity partly due to climate change — as a big reason why. Grayson Badgley, research scientist at CarbonPlan, a US-based non-profit​, said it’s a “risky bet” to count on trees — temporary stores of carbon — to compensate for the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels that stays in the atmosphere for centuries.

In 2018, Mosaic, a logging company, and its partners committed to stop cutting down trees in the project area and instead protect them for 30 years. The company is measuring the tons of additional CO2 stored and the forestry-related emissions avoided, and packaging each of those as a carbon credit for sale to companies or individuals looking to offset their carbon footprint. Each credit represents one ton of CO2 removed or not added to the atmosphere.

The project has already issued 1.4 million credits, an amount equivalent to the total emissions of Sierra Leone in 2021. They’ve been bought by UK-based AI company Dataiku, global insurance firm Aspen and the American Institute for Foreign Study, a travel and insurance company, among others, according to Bloomberg Green analysis of public data. There’s currently no information to indicate any of those companies’ credits have been impacted by this year’s fire.

Under the rules of the offset registry Verra, whose standard Mosaic uses, the company has 30 days to report any damage to its forests and up to two years to submit a “loss report” detailing its impact. As a type of insurance mechanism against wildfires and other risks, project developers must contribute a portion of their credits to what’s known as a buffer pool. If disaster strikes and impacts a project’s carbon inventory, the standard states that an equivalent number of credits are taken out of the pool.

BigCoast’s buffer pool is 15.5% of its issued credits, Mosaic said. But none of these are earmarked for natural risks like extreme weather, pest outbreaks and fire, according to project documentation. That’s because the company evaluates that risk — calculated according to a matrix of significance and likelihood — to be zero.

That assessment is “mind-boggling,” said William Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy at the University of Utah. Fires are a “really dramatic risk” that forest offset projects face, he said, along with other risks such as drought stress and insect outbreaks.

Mosaic said its risk assessment is based on the fact that “the project is geographically and ecologically diverse and distributed,” meaning the likelihood of widespread damage due to fires or something else measures as “insignificant.”

Under Verra’s rules, credits allocated against other risks can backstop a fire incident, but in the long run this could have a serious impact on the insurance efficacy, Anderegg said. If wildfires eat up more than was budgeted, that has “very real impacts on whether these projects are likely to succeed over a century,” he said.

A team of researchers led by Barbara Haya at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy recently identified a set of shortcomings in carbon offset registry methods, like those used by BigCoast, that could “critically undermine” their buffer pool policies. None take into account how climate change may increase fire risk, for example.

The shortcomings represent an “over-crediting risk,” Haya said in an interview. “Credits are being awarded [for CO2] that might be lost back into the atmosphere, but you don’t have the number of credits to cover that,” she said.

In the US, CarbonPlan’s Badgley and a team of researchers found California’s buffer pool to be “severely undercapitalized.”

Verra relies on “the historical likelihood of an event occurring” to guide its buffer pool policies, said spokesperson Joel Finkelstein. The nonprofit is set to update its insurance tool later in the summer to better account for changing risks due to climate change.

Canadian offset developers across the country are nervous about the rest of the fire season. “This is a wake-up call,” said André Gravel, chief executive of Société de gestion d’actifs forestiers (Solifor), which runs the Monet Forest Conservation Project. “The frequency of fires is increasing,” he said.

“Everyone is very concerned and on high alert,” said Adrian Leslie, manager of a Nature Conservancy of Canada forestry offsets project called Darkwoods in British Columbia. The group said approximately 4,485 hectares of the project burned in 2021, or less than 10% of the total area. That equates to about 36,700 tonnes of CO2 being released, according to a preliminary estimate shared by Leslie.

“The IPCC has made it very clear that every ton matters, every year matters, every degree matters,” Kurz said. Wildfire risk is increasing and project developers must recognize and address this: “We have to bend the curve.”

--With assistance from Demetrios Pogkas.

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