The wildfire that engulfed parts of Fort McMurray this spring is both a harbinger of and contributor to climate change —a blaze unprecedented for both its size and destructive capacity.
But new research suggests there may be a silver lining in the cloud of smoke.
Two studies—one in Latin America, one in B.C.—look at the potential carbon sequestering capacity of new growth in previously deforested areas.
According to a study from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) published this spring in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, B.C.’s pine beetle-ravaged forests are set to make up lost CO2 sequestering capacity by 2020.
In a news release, PICS researchers say the loss of 18 million hectares of forest temporarily turned B.C.’s forests into net emitters of CO2.
However, “by 2020, the enhanced growth due to climate change and increasing CO2 more than compensates for the carbon loss from dead rotting trees,” lead researcher Vivek Arora, of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis was quoted as saying. “This turn-around will happen much sooner than we had imagined.”
The researchers also found that while the warming climate is contributing to increased insect outbreaks and forest fires, it’s also making B.C.’s high-latitude forests warmer and wetter. That, mixed with a rich supply of atmospheric CO2, is allowing them to “recover faster from harvest, fire and insect disturbance.”
“This enhanced forest growth substantially outpaces the reduced carbon uptake by forests that has been caused by the pine beetle outbreak, even after taking into account the increased forest fires,” the study found.
That potentially enhanced carbon sequestering capacity was also noted in a study of Latin American forests recovering from large-scale logging.
The study, published in Science Advances in May, used computer modelling to determine the carbon storage capacity of young forests allowed to regrow naturally after clear cutting.
“The researchers found that any forest that is cut and allowed to regrow naturally in Latin America will double its carbon storage capacity within 20 years and increase that storage by 120 percent in 40 years,” according to Grist. “The study shows that all of Latin America’s secondary lowland forests can store the equivalent of all of the human carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use and industry in Latin America between 1993 and 2014.”
In May, forestry officials had pegged the total carbon emissions of the Fort McMurray forest fire at 41 megatonnes—around five per cent of Canada’s total carbon emissions in 2014.
Merritt Turetsky, a Canada Research Chair and ecosystem ecologist at the University of Guelph, told the Edmonton Journal that the regrowth and “reorganization” after a fire “can actually . . . tip the balance toward net cooling.” However, it will likely be decades before the fire ravaged forests return to carbon sink status, officials say.
By Jonny Wakefield, 7 July 2016