On a June day in 2023, New Yorkers woke up to an eerie scene: the sky had turned a murky orange, the sun a dim red orb in the haze. The culprit? Smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away, in Canada. This surreal tableau, once a rarity, has become increasingly common as North America grapples with more frequent and intense wildfires. A new report by researchers from the Global Forest Watch initiative at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland reveals the massive scale of Canada’s 2023 wildfires. The fires scorched approximately 7.8 million hectares (19.3 million acres) of forests in Canada last year, an area nearly the size of Ireland. First Nations communities were particularly hard hit by the 2023 wildfires. More than 42% of wildfire evacuations in 2023 were from communities that are more than half Indigenous. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires turns New York’s skies orange on June 7, 2023. Image by Anthony Quintano via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). All this burning produced roughly 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report, almost four times more than the global aviation sector in the same year. “[Emissions were] six times the average for the last 20-plus years,” James MacCarthy, a research associate at Global Forest Watch and one of the report’s authors, told Mongabay. “It’s astonishing just how much more we’ve seen in recent years.” To put this in perspective, these emissions are equivalent to the annual output of about 652…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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