The sub-Arctic town pitching itself as Canada's gateway to Europe. "But again, let's remember that climate change is upon us," he noted. "What's the polar season going to look like in 10 years' time, or 20 years' time?"

 

Churchill mayor Mike Spence is hoping his town's port can serve as a hub for shorter shipping from Canada to Europe 

by  Nadine YousifSenior Canada reporter, Churchill, Manitoba 

 

The Port of Churchill sits idle for most of the year, blanketed by snow and frozen by the bitter cold climate of Canada's sub-Arctic. It's only operational in the summer for four months, sometimes five.

But where weather is a hindrance, it has geography on its side - the northern Manitoba port sits on the Hudson Bay, a vast body of water with a direct route through the Bay's strait into the Labrador Sea and the north Atlantic Ocean.

From there, cargo ships sail more quickly to Europe, and can reach Africa and South America, delivering goods ranging from food to critical minerals, and even – Canada's leaders hope – liquified natural gas (LNG).

For decades, ambitions of expanding the Port of Churchill have fallen short — derailed, locals argue, under years of poor management as experts openly questioned whether an Arctic port makes good economic sense. Canada is now hoping to change that, guided by the inevitability of climate change, the challenge of US tariffs, and Europe's energy shortage fuelled by ongoing global conflicts.

"Canada has an abundance of resources, and this port expansion will mean we can ship more to the world," Prime Minister Mark Carney said earlier this year.

The expansion of the Port of Churchill has been flagged as a key project by Carney that has the potential to transform Canada's economy and reduce its trade reliance on the US, working towards the prime minister's goal of doubling non-US exports in the next decade.

To outsiders, Churchill is known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Its economy has long relied on seasonal tourism, with visitors flocking to the town in the late summer and autumn to catch a glimpse of the northern lights and local wildlife like beluga whales, caribou and — as its moniker suggests — polar bears.

But it is also the site of Canada's only Arctic deep-water seaport, meaning it has the potential to accommodate ultra-large container vessels, oil tankers and LNG ships. With rail access to Churchill through southern Manitoba, the town has a direct travel path to resource-rich western Canada.

Because of Churchill's frigid sub-Arctic temperatures, the port is currently operational for only about four to five months a year 

The Port of Churchill opened nearly a century ago and was primarily used to export grain from the prairies. That ended in 2016, as shipments declined with producers opting for cheaper routes. It reopened in 2019, when it began shipping grain again as well as key supplies to other parts of northern Canada.

For Churchill, a remote town of approximately 1,000 residents, developing the port is seen as an opportunity to create hundreds of jobs and improve quality of life.

The port had fallen into disrepair under a Denver-based company that took ownership of it in 1997, said Mike Spence, the mayor of Churchill and co-chairman of the Arctic Gateway Group, a consortium of indigenous and community groups that now own the port.

Spence said the group wanted "to take control of our own destiny". The ownership transfer was finalised in 2018.

Since then, Ottawa has spent C$320m ($235m; £174m) on the port, including on its maintenance and restoration.

"The previous owner didn't invest in the port, in the rail line," Spence told the BBC, speaking inside a small restaurant attached to a hotel that he co-owns in Churchill — one of the few that stays open in the off-season winter months.

Work has since been done to modernise the railway and the port's infrastructure. In August 2024, the port delivered its first critical mineral shipment ever to Belgium.

It is now funding studies to see if it can be economically viable year-round, and if so, become a hub that would be capable of delivering resources to Europe. The port has also been pitched as a way for Canada to strengthen its Arctic sovereignty.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said the goal is to start shipping out gas from the Port of Churchill by 2030 - a timeline dismissed by his political opponents as a "complete fabrication".

Alex Crawford, an assistant professor and researcher of Arctic climate systems at the University of Manitoba, is part of a team that was tapped by Arctic Gateway Group to study open water shipping in the region.

"Ice-free shipping year-round is not going to happen this century, even with a really aggressive warming scenario," he said.

He told the BBC that navigating Canada's Arctic waters is a complicated task because ice forms inconsistently along the Hudson Bay, making it difficult for ships to travel through for most of the year without an escort of costly icebreakers.

Icebreakers have been used by Russia in recent years to export natural gas and minerals year-round from Siberia to Asia through the Northern Sea Route. The vessels, which are nuclear-powered, have been dubbed "the world's largest and most powerful" by the US Naval Institute.

Canada's icebreaker fleet is much smaller by comparison, and plans to build new ships have been derailed over decades by bureaucracy and limited resources.

 In recent years, Canada launched a plan to build a new fleet, including a class 2 icebreaker that can operate year-round and cut through ice as tall as 10ft. It is this type of advanced icebreaker that would make navigating through the frozen Hudson Bay possible, Crawford said.

 

There are also questions on whether a port expansion would jeopardise the local wildlife and with it, the valuable tourism industry.

Mayor Spence said that concern will be part of ongoing engagement with the local community.

"But again, let's remember that climate change is upon us," he noted. "What's the polar season going to look like in 10 years' time, or 20 years' time?"

He added that people in the region want employment. "The trick here is to find a balance."

Others are skeptical about just how much economic potential the Port of Churchill can unlock, especially if it is not operating year-round.

Ecotourism is Churchill, Manitoba's largest industry, as visitors flock to the town in the summer months to catch a glimpse of polar bears and the northern lights

"From a standard maritime shipping perspective, it does not make much sense unfortunately," said Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of Maritime Business Administration at Texas A&M University in Galveston.

Rodrigue noted that navigating Arctic waters in and of itself is expensive because ships need to be especially equipped for the harsher conditions. He added that demand for LNG is typically constant, meaning the port would need to operate 12 months of the year.

Businesses, he said, will need to consider whether it's worth the extra costs to shorten travel by just a few days.

He noted that the Port of Churchill has long been "a symbol of Canadian Arctic maritime ambitions".

Those ambitions, he argued, have not been realised because the project has failed to deliver a clear business case in the past.

While the Port of Churchill's development has been flagged as a focus area for Prime Minister Carney's economic growth plans, it is not on the shortlist of projects due to receive more immediate federal government support, signalling its expansion is not yet a sure thing.

But Rodrigue is not entirely pessimistic. He said the port could serve a niche, particularly for stockpiling and delivering strategic minerals mined in western Canada.

Canada now finds itself at an "inflection point", he said, which could transform the way businesses and the public view the port.

Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced nearly a decade’s worth of blaze emissions

 

 

The health impacts from last year’s fires will also continue to be felt for decades. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

 

 

 Fires made at least three times more likely by climate crisis and emitted about 2bn tonnes of CO2, data reveals.

 

Canada’s “record-shattering” wildfires last year produced nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions in one season as would be expected over a decade of fires in normal circumstances, data has shown.

The fires, in Canada’s “wildest season ever”, were made at least three times more likely by the climate crisis, and produced about 2bn tonnes of CO₂, about a quarter of the total global emissions from wildfires last year, according to data in the State of Wildfires report, published on Wednesday.

The health impacts from last year’s fires will also continue to be felt for decades.

Carbon dioxide from wildfires is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, reaching about 8.6bn tonnes last year, considerably more than the 4.8bn annual emissions of the US from all sources. However, the net impact of fires is likely to be reduced by the regrowth of vegetation taking up carbon from the atmosphere.

Matthew Jones, a research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, and lead author of the report, warned that damage from intensifying wildfires would continue to increase unless the world succeeded in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. Wildfires not only kill people, wildlife and livestock, and devastate trees and other landscapes, but can cause widespread and dangerous air pollution.

They are also an increasingly important contributor to the climate crisis, through their greenhouse gas emissions and destruction of carbon stored in vegetation and soil.

“These fires are something we should all be concerned about,” he said. “The full effects of last year’s fires will not be seen for a long time.”

Huge wildfires sweep across British Columbia 

 Canada’s fires, with a burned area that was six times greater than the average year, were some of last year’s worst. Brazil’s Amazonas state also had record highs, owing to a severe drought, while fires in Hawaii and Texas killed more than 100 people. The biggest single fire ever recorded in the EU burned 900 sq km of Greece.

However, lower than usual levels of burning in African savannah meant the greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires last year were only 16% above average – if savannahs had burned at their usual rate, rather than experiencing such relative calm, last year would have set a new record.

Separate data from the World Resources Institute showed that in 2023 nearly 12m hectares were burned by forest fires, an area roughly the size of Nicaragua, which was about a quarter more than the previous record in 2016. Between 2001 and 2023, the area burned has increased by about 5.4% a year, with the result that forest fires now result in nearly 6m more hectares of tree cover loss a year than they did in 2001 – an area roughly the size of Croatia.

Fires require not just high temperatures, but also an abundance of dry vegetation, and some form of ignition – either human or natural – to start and to continue burning fiercely. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions must be the biggest priority to prevent more wildfires in future, the authors said, but better land management and early warning systems could also help.

Banning people from setting fires, creating fire breaks and boundaries, and managing agricultural and forested areas in such a way as to reduce the amount of dry brush that provides fuel for fires, are also important. Providing masks and ventilation can also reduce the air pollution impact.

Early warning systems can be limited, however – in many hot areas there is a high likelihood of fire for most of the summer season.

“Wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense as the climate warms, and both society and the environment are suffering from the consequences,” said Jones.

Although wildfires occur naturally in many of the world’s hot regions, the effects of the climate crisis on their frequency and severity are now clear, according to the report. Human-driven changes to the climate made fires three times more likely in Canada, 20 times more likely in western Amazonia, and twice as likely in Greece.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to mount, bigger fires can be expected. The researchers found that a Canadian born today would be more likely than not to experience another fire of similar magnitude to last year’s inferno within their lifetime, compared with a one in 10 chance of seeing such a fire for someone born in the 1940s.

Even wetlands and moist rainforests are now at high risk of fire, as unprecedented drought has taken hold. Brazil’s Pantanal region was devastated in June by record-breaking fires, which laid waste to globally important wildlife habitats.

Although regrowing forests can absorb carbon dioxide from the air as they develop – creating a “delayed carbon sink” – the shifts to more frequent fires are creating a worrying trend, where vegetation has less chance to recover, Jones added. This is making fires an increasing source of carbon in the atmosphere.

“The real problem begins when you have a shift in the fire regime away from its natural state and towards more frequent and severe burning. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’re seeing in forests, and it’s resulting in an imbalance – immediate emissions from forest fires this decade are increasingly outweighing the delayed sinks from fires in previous decades,” he said.

The State of Wildfires report 2023-24, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, was led by the University of East Anglia, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and the Met Office, with the help of a broad network of researchers and institutions around the world. Scientists used global satellite observations, computer models and research from regional experts to compile the data.

Parts of Canada’s Boreal Forest Are Burning Faster Than They Can Regrow

The delicate balance of one of the planet’s largest natural systems for storing carbon depends on the humble black spruce tree.

 Manuela Andreoni, a climate reporter, and Bryan Denton, a photographer, traveled with researchers to Canada’s boreal forests in the Northwest Territories

 

The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks standing tall above the gray landscape as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground.

The spruce seedlings were gone.

Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. It was a scorching late spring morning, and she and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier.

“Wow, it’s kind of crazy in here,” Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape. She had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire.

The boreal forests are the largest forests in the world, and in Western Canada they evolved to burn once every century or so. But this patch of forest had just burned for the second time in a decade. As a result, many trees would struggle here, she explained. The slow-growing black spruce didn’t stand a chance.

Where Canada’s Monster Fires Burned — and Re-Burned

 

More frequent, bigger wildfires, fueled by climate change, are a formidable challenge to the black spruce, a species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years. Their gradual decline, now accelerated by last year’s fire season, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the new age of wildfires aren’t just overwhelming people with the smoke and destructive blazes now raging across North America — they are overwhelming nature, too.

The dwindling number of black spruce trees, scientists say, is deeply transforming an ecosystem that is one of Earth’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide, a crucial tool to keep the atmosphere from warming even more than it already has.

Last year’s fires engulfed a stretch of forest the size of the Netherlands for at least the second time in 50 years, according to an analysis by Natural Resources Canada, a federal government department.

What was troubling, Dr. Baltzer noted, is that fire isn’t supposed to make life harder for the black spruce tree. Quite the opposite.

Jennifer Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, in a spruce stand that burned last year outside Behchoko, Northwest Territories.

 

Black spruce cones, which open and release their seeds with the help of fire.

 

 

Black spruce forests didn’t just evolve alongside fire, they depend on it. The tree is a natural bonfire of sorts. Its branches are covered with flammable resin that fuels the flames of forest fires right up to the tree’s crown. Fires help melt the waxy coating of black spruce cones until the trees release seeds onto the soil where seedlings can grow.

But if they burn too often, there aren’t enough viable seeds to reproduce. Burn too hot, and the seeds are killed. Burn too deeply, and the organic layer of soil where black spruce trees thrive, and which takes decades to accumulate, is gone.

In recent years, the black spruce failed to regenerate after fire in a fifth of the hundreds of sites Dr. Baltzer and other researchers monitored in North America’s boreal forests. And that was before the fire season of 2023.

The black spruce’s struggles are a gradual break to an ancient natural cycle, one that releases planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere as old trees burn, and then gradually returns that carbon to the land, in the form of new trees and new soil. Any imbalance in this tug of war between life and death can threaten the boreal forests’ ability to store heat-trapping carbon.

Where Black Spruce Dominates Canada’s Boreal Forest

Last summer, temperatures in Canada were more than 2.2 degrees Celsius, or 4 degrees Fahrenheit, above the historical average of the past few decades. Around the Northwest Territories, it was even hotter. The heat is largely why fires as severe as last year’s happened many years before scientists anticipated. Most climate projections didn’t expect these kinds of fires until later in the century, a new preprint study found.

“The entire bloody country was hot and dry at the same time,” said Marc-André Parisien, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service and an author of the study. “If you would have told me that a few years ago, I’d be like no, that doesn’t really make sense.”

Forest fires are burning more than twice as much tree cover as they did 20 years ago. They have also become more intense and frequent, especially in the boreal forests, according to a recent study. Increasing temperatures, fueled by the burning of oil, gas and coal, are the biggest culprit.

 A wildfire burning south of Enterprise, Northwest Territories, last August. Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

 

In the Northwest Territories, as Dr. Baltzer drove through the burned forests on her way to visit another site, she recalled the moment the scope of the 2023 tragedy became clear. She was reading headlines about the immense blazes when it hit her that the planet had briefly reached the temperature at which countries had agreed in the Paris Agreement to cap warming: 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

Temperatures would need to be at that level for several years for the global target to be breached. But for a scientist who had spent much of her career tracking fire, the consequences of a planet that was warming this quickly were clear.

If the world continued on this trajectory, it didn’t matter how hard she or anyone worked to protect the boreal forests.

“Everything will burn,” she said.

‘The trees melted’

A single burned tree near Kakisa, Northwest Territories, an area that has burned twice in the last 10 years.

The scraggly, skinny black spruce trees may not be much to look at. But what lies in the soils below them is one of nature’s biggest gifts to living things, a vault of the forest’s past lives, in icy slow decomposition, that stores immense amounts of planet-warming carbon.

The researchers were on their way to document another area that had burned in 2023 when they walked into an ancient black spruce stand. As they stepped on the ground, it sank several inches below their feet. Then it bounced right back.

The cold temperatures of northern Canada slow down the microbes that eat the dead moss and leaves on the ground. Inches, or sometimes several feet, of organic matter remain on the soil even as new trees, moss and lichen, one of the caribou’s favorite foods, grow on top.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soils. The acidic nature of the trees’ needles helps slow down decomposition and its bushy branches help catch snow, making soils colder during winter.

The black spruce is one of the few trees that can grow on such spongy soil.

As the researchers approached the burned patch, walking became harder. The ground was now full of enormous potholes covered by thin layers of singed plants. The black spruce trees, many more than a century old, had all fallen, their blackened roots sticking up to the sky, many of their seeds dead.

“It looks like the trees melted,” Dr. Baltzer said.

Austin McIntosh, a technician, and Kyle Fennig, a research assistant, grabbed a tool to measure how much of the soil had combusted. In some patches, more than half of the organic matter in the ground was gone.

Their measurements were perhaps a glimpse into the future of that ecosystem. The amount of carbon that soils hold after the spruce trees are gone can fall by up to 80 percent, a recent study showed. It then takes several decades for the forest to restore it.

Kyle Fennig, left, and Maya Provenzano, students at Wilfrid Laurier University, gathered data in a stand of black spruce that burned during the 2023 fire season, near Behchoko.

 

The top of a soil core sample is dotted with organic material, including Geopyxis carbonaria, pixie cup lichen and green polytricha moss.

When fires kill off black spruce trees, they are often replaced by other native trees, such as birch or aspen. These species survive in part because they grow a lot faster. But because they drop their leaves every year, which stops mosses from growing, the soil around these trees doesn’t store as much carbon.

Some researchers have found these fast-growing, less flammable trees can help protect black spruce seedlings. But researchers fear that the era of more frequent fires has broken that balance because spruce trees are killed off too quickly.

When Dr. Baltzer pulled on one section of burned soil, as if it were a thick wool rug, there was ice below. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long, she told the team. Now that the organic layer protecting the frozen soil was gone, it would thaw quickly, completely changing this corner of the ecosystem. What would happen next would depend on how wet the soil would become.

“I would expect this to get wetter,” she said. Maybe other trees, like larch, could grow here then. “But possibly not black spruce.”

At scale, the implications of how well the black spruce fares in places like this could change how scientists expect global warming to play out in the future. Put together, the soils of the Arctic and the boreal forests, which stretch from North America to Asia and Europe, store almost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere.

 

‘No more water’

Chief Fred Sangris of the community of Ndilo.

For the Dene First Nations, which have lived in the boreal forests of the Northwest Territories for centuries, the menacing forces of the new age of wildfires are a consequence of the deep transformations they have watched unfold around them for years.

Chief Fred Sangris, of the community of Ndilo on the edge of Yellowknife, the territorial capital, has seen the permafrost melt into large ponds, and ancient trees sink as their roots lost their grip on the mushy soils. He noticed new islands emerging when the water levels at the Great Slave Lake sank to record lows. And he felt the peat soils, once as soft as mattresses, dry up and harden.

As Chief Sangris walked in the old-growth forests of Dettah, the hamlet where he grew up some 15 miles south of Yellowknife, he couldn’t find any of the black spruce gum that the Dene people use to make teas that help treat upset stomachs. The trees had all turned gray.

“These trees are dying because there’s no more water,” he said, as the soil crackled below his feet. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The ecosystem that is a central part of much of Dene culture had changed before Chief Sangris’s eyes. He grew up collecting berries, fishing and hunting caribou in these lands. But caribou populations have long been declining and finding ripe berries in drier forests has become harder.

More than half the population in the Northwest Territories’ 42,000 people are Indigenous. First Nations officials are now pushing for a bigger role in shaping policy on topics like fire management and evacuation strategies.

They are worried about protecting communities that had never been under wildfire threat. The Dene hamlets of Dettah, Behchoko and Ndilo were evacuated for the first time last year. So was Yellowknife, a city of 20,000 that has historically been a safe harbor to communities deeper in the forest.

The burned remains of a gallery and gift shop in Enterprise

A section of forest that burned in last year’s fires is visible from the road between Kakisa and Enterprise.

Weeks after the trip to the Northwest Territories, Dr. Baltzer said, the images of the burned forests were still in her mind. She felt confident that the data her team collected would help manage wildlife and protect First Nations communities. Given how huge the boreal forests are, her research could help shed light on which parts of the ecosystem were most important to protect.

The research is also poised to help improve the global models that forecast how climate change will affect the planet. Estimates from a United Nations panel of experts project that, sometime in the next decade, global temperatures will rise to a sustained level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, from the current level of about 1.2 or 1.3 degrees. If temperatures rise above that, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction will become significantly harder for humanity to handle.

Extreme fires like last year’s that ravage enormous tracts of forests are “completely absent from the current climate models,” said Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, near Paris, who tracks carbon dioxide emissions.

Because of that, he said, “the models are probably too optimistic.”

As he stood at the edge of the lake by Dettah, Chief Sangris watched small fishing boats cross the blue waters, glistening in the sun. He recounted his community’s efforts to adapt to the changes around them across several generations. They built fire breaks, found evacuation routes, fought mining interests and developed programs to grow more food locally so they wouldn’t need to rely on the forest as much as they have in the past. Their goal was to stay on their ancestral land.

“You put your canoe here, you’re in the wilderness,” he said. “We’re not moving. This is our home.”

 

 

(Martianization) Extreme Wildfires Have Doubled in 2 Decades, Study Finds

 

Firefighters and residents trying to extinguish a fire in Canakkale, northwest Turkey, in August. Last year was the most extreme year for wildfire intensity on record.

 

In a changing climate, extreme wildfire events are becoming far more common and more intense, according to a new analysis.

By Austyn Gaffney

The hottest year on record, 2023, was also the most extreme for wildfires, according to new research.

Both the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires have more than doubled in the last two decades, the study found. And when the ecological, social and economic consequences of wildfires were accounted for, six of the last seven years were the most “energetically intense.”

“That we’ve detected such a big increase over such a short period of time makes the findings even more shocking,” said Calum Cunningham, a postdoctoral researcher in pyrogeography at the University of Tasmania and lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “We’re seeing the manifestations of a warming and drying climate before our very eyes in these extreme fires.”

Last week wildfires in New Mexico killed two people and burned more than 24,000 acres; in Southern California, more than 14,000 acres burned near Los Angeles; and in Turkey, at least 12 people died and many more were injured by fires that started on Thursday from burning crop residue, according to Turkish health authorities and ministers.

Even though wildfires can be deadly and cost the United States up to $893 billion annually, which includes the costs of rebuilding and the economic effects of pollution and injuries, most fires are “relatively benign and in most cases ecologically beneficial,” Dr. Cunningham said.

The new study looked at the total power emitted by clusters of fire events, defined as fires burning at the same time in proximity, or in the same spot, at multiple times in a single day. The researchers analyzed 21 years of data collected by two NASA satellites between January 2003 and November 2023 to quantify how fire activity has changed over time.

They identified 2,913 extreme events out of more than 30 million fires across the world. Such extreme fire events were also defined by the vast amount of smoke they emitted, their high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, which can further accelerate global warming, and the fire’s ecological, social, and economic effects.

“This has been the holy grail for me,” said David Bowman, senior author of the study and professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. While he observed fires growing stronger, especially in Australia after 2019’s bush fires killed 173 people and almost three billion vertebrates, he said he needed the data from the study to show a trend and convey something enormous is happening.

“When you have these signals that are so frightening, it’s also really motivating,” Dr. Bowman said. “There’s an imperative to do something about this.”

The global increase in the frequency and intensity of fires was almost exclusively caused by changes in two regions. In the temperate conifer forests of the western United States and Canada, extreme fire events increased by more than 11-fold, from six in 2003 to 67 in 2023. The boreal forests of North America and Russia’s northern latitudes saw a 7.3-fold increase in energetically extreme fires.

The scientists plan to examine why the fires in these biomes were so extreme, but Dr. Cunningham said their findings were consistent with the effects of climate change, which make conditions hotter and drier in these forests and more conducive to extreme events.

This scale of wildfire threatens not only nearby communities but also people living far away because dense smoke can significantly affect air quality and can travel great distances.

“The largest smoke events come from the most intense fire events,” said Jeffrey Pierce, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. “If you don’t have the ability to clean air in your home or seek places that have air purification systems,” wildfire smoke can have strong health effects.

Jennifer R. Marlon, a research scientist and lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said the study showed that humans are changing patterns of forest and grassland burning far beyond what we’ve ever done in the past.

“Larger and more severe wildfires are one of the most obvious manifestations of a planet that is heating up,” Dr. Marlon said in an email. “If we can help people better understand that connection, we may be able to build support for working more quickly to reduce the root causes of the problem — burning fossil fuels.”

Austyn Gaffney is a reporter covering climate and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

Em 2024: Pantanal vive a pior temporada de incêndios - Brazil

Amazônia tem alta de 286% em foco de queimadas - Brazil

Environmental row over ‘last chance tourism’ in Canada’s melting Arctic

 

Link to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/08/environmental-row-last-chance-tourism-canada-melting-arctic-pond-inlet

Martianization - O que são os 'incêndios zumbis' que ameaçam o Canadá no inverno

 

 

O fenômeno aumentou em um ritmo assustador em 2024
Nadine Yousif
Role, Da BBC News em Toronto
 

Mesmo no auge do inverno do Canadá, as brasas da temporada recorde de incêndios florestais do ano passado permanecem.

Os chamados "incêndios zumbis" estão queimando mesmo no inverno - são brasas que continuam vivam no solo sob espessas camadas de neve. E eles crescem a um ritmo sem precedentes, aumentando os temores sobre o que o verão que se aproxima pode trazer.

As pessoas que dirigem na rodovia que passa pela cidade de Fort Nelson, na Colúmbia Britânica, no inverno, podem facilmente ver – e sentir o cheiro – as nuvens de fumaça branca fluindo do solo ao seu redor.

Sonja Leverkus, bombeira e cientista que mora na pequena cidade do nordeste da província, lembra-se de ter dirigido durante uma tempestade de neve em novembro, mas a neve não parecia branca.

 

“Eu nunca tinha visto uma tempestade de neve que cheirasse a fumaça”, disse Leverkus, que mora na região há mais de 15 anos.

As nuvens de fumaça ainda eram visíveis em fevereiro, acrescentou ela, mesmo em dias extremamente frios, quando as temperaturas caíram para -40°C.

 

População de Fort Nelson, como Trevor Scott (foto), notou o aumento das fumaças

 

Incêndios zumbis

A fumaça de Fort Nelson é o resultado de 'incêndios zumbis' - também chamados de 'incêndios de inverno'.

Eles são brasas sem chama que queimam lentamente abaixo da superfície e são mantidos vivos graças a um solo orgânico chamado turfa, comum nas florestas boreais da América do Norte, e a espessas camadas de neve que os isolam do frio.

Esses incêndios não são incomuns. Nos últimos 10 anos, a Colúmbia Britânica viu, em média, cinco ou seis que continuaram a arder durante os meses frios, dizem os especialistas.

Mas em Janeiro deste ano, a província registou um pico sem precedentes de 106 "incêndios zombies ativos", aumentando a preocupação entre os cientistas sobre o que estes incêndios poderão significar para a próxima época de incêndios florestais.

 

A maioria normalmente se apaga por conta própria antes da primavera, mas 91 ainda estão queimando na província, de acordo com dados da administração local.

Aqueles que não forem extintos até março vão gerar um grande risco quando a neve derreter e eles ficarem expostos ao ar. Os cientistas os associaram ao início precoce das temporadas de incêndios florestais.

A província vizinha de Alberta também registros um aumento nestes incêndios de inverno, com 57 focos no início de fevereiro – quase 10 vezes mais do que a média de cinco anos.

“É muito alarmante ver esta combustão contínua durante o inverno, especialmente depois da temporada recorde de incêndios florestais no Canadá no ano passado" ,diz Jennifer Baltzer, professora de biologia na Universidade Wilfrid Laurier.

Mais de 18 milhões de hectares (44 milhões de acres) de terra foram queimados por incêndios florestais no Canadá em 2023 – uma área aproximadamente do tamanho do Camboja – superando em muito a média de 10 anos do país.

A temporada foi uma das mais fatais da história recente, com vários bombeiros morrendo no cumprimento do dever.

Milhares de pessoas foram forçadas a abandonar as suas casas e o efeito foi sentido muito para além das fronteiras do Canadá, quando a fumaça cobriu uma grande parte dos EUA em Junho.

Essa temporada calamitosa de incêndios florestais é uma das razões pelas quais a Columbia Britânica está vendo agora um número tão alto de incêndios zumbis, diz Mike Flannigan, professor e especialista em gerenciamento de incêndios na Universidade Thompson Rivers, no Canadá.

A maioria deles são incêndios que não puderam ser totalmente apagados até o outono passado simplesmente devido à falta de recursos, disse ele.

Até o final do ano, as autoridades registraram um total de mais de 2.200 incêndios florestais na província.

Outra razão, disse o professor Flannigan, é a seca extrema que a província tem enfrentado nos últimos dois anos.

Em fevereiro, a maior parte da regiãoo estava sob níveis de seca médios a extremos, de acordo com o mapa de secas.

Assim como os "incêndios zumbis", a seca também tem sido perceptível, diz Leverkus.

Quando estava na floresta no verão passado, ela disse ter notado que um riacho que costumava fluir livremente agora é “apenas poças”.

Estas condições de seca persistiram durante o inverno. A província viu tão pouca neve que uma estação de esqui na região de South Cariboo foi forçada a fechar suas portas no início de janeiro para o resto da temporada.

 

Consequências das mudanças climáticas

Os "incêndios zumbis" já foram raros, mas os cientistas dizem que se tornaram mais comuns nos últimos anos devido ao aquecimento global.

Por enquanto, os "incêndios zumbis" estão sendo apenas monitorados por autoridades, diz Forrest Tower, porta-voz sobre o assunto das autoridades da província.

Ele disse que muitos deles não podem ser apagados manualmente porque a maior parte da força de combate a incêndios da província está de folga durante o período de entressafra. Eles ainda não representam um risco, disse ele.

Mas a principal preocupação é que os incêndios possam reacender se a região continuar a ter muito pouca neve ou chuva na primavera.

Se isso acontecer, ele disse que a equipe sazonal de incêndios florestais da província poderá entrar imediatamente em ação em março ou abril.

Flannigan diz que é muito cedo para prever exatamente como será a próxima temporada de incêndios, mas o que a província viu até agora “é bastante incomum”.

E sendo um ano de El Niño, que indica condições quentes e secas para o oeste do Canadá, Flannigan diz que tudo aponta para "uma primavera muito ativa”.

Martianization, Just How Bad Was the Pollution in New York?

 

The air in New York City on Wednesday wasn’t just bad by the city’s standards. It was historically bad, even compared with places around the world that generally experience much more air pollution.

 

 Canada 

 Will Wildfires Like These Become the New Normal?  Canada’s devastating fires and toxic smoke might not recur every year, but the heat from climate change increases the risks of a wide range of disasters.

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/climate/wildfires-canada.html

 

 

A lot of Arctic infrastructure is threatened by rising temperatures

 

Russia will be particularly badly hit

By The Economist.

A quarter of the northern hemisphere’s land is covered by permafrost, defined as ground that remains at or below 0°C for at least two years in succession. Most of this is above the Arctic Circle, a part of the world that is warming at a rate double the global average, with significant consequences for the rest of the planet. Arctic permafrost is thought to contain some 1.7trn tonnes of carbon, most of it in frozen organic matter. That is double the amount of the stuff currently residing in the atmosphere. Rising temperatures mean that much of this material may turn into carbon dioxide and methane as the ground thaws and micro-organisms get to work. That will drive further warming, causing a feedback loop of more melting and yet more greenhouse-gas emission.

These risks are re-emphasised in a paper just published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. It warns that warming of the top three metres of permafrost alone could result in the release of 624m tonnes of carbon a year by 2100, a figure similar to the current emissions of Canada or Saudi Arabia. But a thawing Arctic poses other, more immediate, problems. Another paper published in the same journal highlights the threat posed to circumpolar infrastructure as the ground beneath it thaws.

Thawing permafrost is a particularly unpredictable environment on which to build. As its ice content changes and the volume of liquid water increases, the soil can experience vertical movements of up to 40cm a year and its capacity to bear weight drops dramatically. This can lead to landslides, to the subsidence of individual buildings, and to the appearance of cracks and deformities in long, linear structures such as roads and pipelines.

The conclusions drawn by lead author Jan Hjort, of the University of Oulu, in Finland, are stark. Of the 120,000 buildings, 40,000km of roads and 9,500km of pipelines currently built on permafrost, up to half are expected to be at high risk by 2060. By then, he estimates, the bill for maintenance could exceed $35bn dollars a year.

Russia is the country most threatened by such changes. Almost 65% of Russian soil is permafrost, and it is here that 60% of the Arctic’s human settlements and almost 90% of its population can be found (see maps). Russian sites are also more likely than those in other parts of the Arctic to contain heavy apartment buildings and large industrial facilities. North America’s permafrost, which makes up half of Canada’s territory and more than three-quarters of Alaska’s, tends to be more sparsely populated than Russia’s, with human impact dominated by roads, airstrips and oil pipelines. Nonetheless, degradation is still an issue. Authorities in the Northwest Territories, one of Canada’s largest and most northerly regions, calculate that permafrost-induced damage amounts, even today, to $41m a year, which is about $900 per resident.

Dr Hjort’s paper also looks at the Arctic conditions which prevail in mountainous regions at lower latitudes. Nearly half of the Tibetan plateau, for example, is covered by permafrost, and this area contains 200,000km of roads and 3,900km of railways. The cost of repairs here runs into the tens of millions of dollars a year. In the European Alps, by contrast, a combination of higher investment and more favourable conditions mean thaw damage is minimal.

Dr Hjort and his colleagues suggest three approaches to increasing resilience, some of which have already been implemented to various extents in different Arctic locations. First, enhance the extraction of heat from thawing soil near structures which need protecting. This can be done by adding porous stone layers to road beds to generate convection, which helps hot air to escape. Decreasing the angle of embankment slopes also helps, by increasing wind flow and reducing the accumulation of snow, which traps heat. Second, limit heat intake by the ground. This means insulating the embankments of roads by increasing their thickness, and also increasing the reflectivity of paved surfaces to minimise the amount of solar radiation absorbed. Third, the ground can be reinforced to create better foundations. One way to do so is to replace layers of permafrost with more stable materials. Another is to thaw the permafrost in a controlled manner, and then build on that consolidated layer.

None of this innovative construction will help, however, if there is a lackadaisical approach to maintaining what has been built. In an earlier study cited by the authors, which looked at the period from 1980 to 2000, most damage to structures in areas of Russia where permafrost abounds was found to have arisen as a result of poor maintenance. Climate change will make that worse. But if local authorities cannot even get the basics right, then large sections of the Russian Arctic may end up being abandoned altogether. 

Canada Announces Exit From Kyoto Climate Treaty

OTTAWA — Canada said on Monday that it would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Under that accord, major industrialized nations agreed to meet targets for reducing emissions, but mandates were not imposed on developing countries like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. The United States never ratified the treaty.

Canada did commit to the treaty, but the agreement has been fraying. Participants at a United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, renewed it on Sunday but could not agree on a new accord to replace it.

Instead, the 200 nations represented at the conference agreed to begin a long-term process of negotiating a new treaty, but without resolving a core issue: whether its requirements will apply equally to all countries.

The decision by Canada’s Conservative Party government had long been expected. A Liberal Party government negotiated Canada’s entry into the agreement, but the Conservative government has never disguised its disdain for the treaty.

In announcing the decision, government officials indicated that the possibility of huge fines for Canada’s failure to meet emissions targets had also played a role.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past,” the environment minister, Peter Kent, told reporters shortly after returning from South Africa. He added that Canada would work toward developing an agreement that includes targets for developing nations, particularly China and India.

“What we have to look at is all major emitters,” Mr. Kent said.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s rules, Canada must formally give notice of its intention to withdraw by the end of this year or else face penalties after 2012.

The extent of those penalties, as well as Canada’s ability to redress its inability to meet the treaty’s emission reduction targets, is a matter of some debate.

Mr. Kent said Canada could meet its commitment only through extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country. He said the Liberal Party had agreed to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”

He also said the failure to meet the targets would have cost Canada $14 billion in penalties.

Other estimates, however, put the figure at $6 billion to $9 billion. Matt Horne, the director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group, said the financial penalties might have been further reduced by agreeing to additional reductions. He also dismissed Mr. Kent’s assertions about the steps that Canada would have had to have taken to meet its commitments as extreme misrepresentations.

“It’s not a surprise that it happened,” Mr. Horne said of the government’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. “But it is a bit of surprise that it happened pretty much as they got off the plane from Durban.”

NYtimes

Canada Announces Exit From Kyoto Climate Treaty

OTTAWA — Canada said on Monday that it would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Under that accord, major industrialized nations agreed to meet targets for reducing emissions, but mandates were not imposed on developing countries like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. The United States never ratified the treaty.

Canada did commit to the treaty, but the agreement has been fraying. Participants at a United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, renewed it on Sunday but could not agree on a new accord to replace it.

Instead, the 200 nations represented at the conference agreed to begin a long-term process of negotiating a new treaty, but without resolving a core issue: whether its requirements will apply equally to all countries.

The decision by Canada’s Conservative Party government had long been expected. A Liberal Party government negotiated Canada’s entry into the agreement, but the Conservative government has never disguised its disdain for the treaty.

In announcing the decision, government officials indicated that the possibility of huge fines for Canada’s failure to meet emissions targets had also played a role.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past,” the environment minister, Peter Kent, told reporters shortly after returning from South Africa. He added that Canada would work toward developing an agreement that includes targets for developing nations, particularly China and India.

“What we have to look at is all major emitters,” Mr. Kent said.

Under the Kyoto Protocol’s rules, Canada must formally give notice of its intention to withdraw by the end of this year or else face penalties after 2012.

The extent of those penalties, as well as Canada’s ability to redress its inability to meet the treaty’s emission reduction targets, is a matter of some debate.

Mr. Kent said Canada could meet its commitment only through extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country. He said the Liberal Party had agreed to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”

He also said the failure to meet the targets would have cost Canada $14 billion in penalties.

Other estimates, however, put the figure at $6 billion to $9 billion. Matt Horne, the director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group, said the financial penalties might have been further reduced by agreeing to additional reductions. He also dismissed Mr. Kent’s assertions about the steps that Canada would have had to have taken to meet its commitments as extreme misrepresentations.

“It’s not a surprise that it happened,” Mr. Horne said of the government’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. “But it is a bit of surprise that it happened pretty much as they got off the plane from Durban.”

NYtimes