A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions
LA Times picks up the storyline about the paucity of money for forest management and fire prevention.
A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions
A firefighter battles the 2020 Creek Fire in Madera County, Calif.(Associated Press)
BY HAYLEY SMITHSTAFF WRITER
OCT. 20, 2022
A nearly two-decade effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single, devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA and University of Chicago researchers.
The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season, which saw more than 4 million acres burn, spewed almost twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of carbon dioxide reductions made since 2003, according to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution.
Researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.
“When we look at the contribution of the 2020 wildfires, it becomes almost like a new sector of emissions in the economy,” said Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a lead author of the research. “Really, we’re about double the reductions.”
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The findings challenge the notion that wildfire emissions should be considered differently than the emissions of tailpipes, industry and other sources because forests eventually grow back, Jerrett said. In fact, the study found that wildfires were second only to transportation as the state’s primary source of planet-warming gases in 2020, ahead of industry and electrical power generation.
He said that’s the essence of the study’s title, “Up In Smoke,” because “a lot of the hard-earned gains to fight climate change could be wiped out if we don’t start changing the way that we manage the forests, manage the interface between human activity and the wildland-urban interface, and really start tracking these emissions more carefully and comparing them with other major sources so that we don’t unwittingly think that we’re meeting our climate goals when we’re not.”
Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, said the agency does not consider wildfire emissions when assessing its progress toward greenhouse gas targets because the targets are specific to human-caused emissions. The approach is aligned with legislative direction, he said, and was designed to ensure that the state’s targets and emissions reductions are comparable with other national inventories.
However, that will soon change, because new guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has clarified that to achieve carbon neutrality, “we must consider all emissions sources and sinks,” Clegern said.
He said the Air Resources Board is starting a process to include wildfire emissions in its 2022 “scoping plan,” which focused on achieving carbon neutrality by 2045.
“Our efforts have been concentrated on reducing the use of fossil fuels because that is the direct cause of climate change. Wildfires on the other hand, are part of the natural carbon cycle,” Clegern said. “However, we are concerned about both the climate and public health impacts from wildfires and that climate change will only exacerbate these impacts in the future. That’s why we’re addressing it in the draft scoping plan and the state is advancing action to both reduce wildfire emissions and improve forest health.”