How sound science, new tools, and targeted action can help manage increasing wildfire emissions

By Brian Buma and Jacquelyn Shuman

Managing and potentially mitigating greenhouse gases from wildfires now that we’ve entered a reinforcing feedback loop may seem like swimming against the tide. But it is possible—and can even be cost effective—with a strong data-to-action pipeline enabled by strategic science and emerging technologies.

Wildfires are a key component of most ecosystems worldwide, burning approximately 750 million hectares per year (Mha yr-1). Due to climate change and human ignitions, wildfires—especially forest wildfires—have become more frequent, intense and synchronized.

While fire plays a critical part of the carbon cycle, climate change is creating a dangerous feedback – more warming drives more fires, which releases more carbon, causing more warming. This is especially true in forests, which have lower burned area globally than grasslands, but where the carbon takes decades to recover – if it ever does.

Forest burned area has grown 40% and carbon emissions have increased 60% since 2001. Extreme fire years are 88-152% more likely compared to 100 years ago. As an example, carbon emissions from the 2023 Canadian fire season ranked 4^th in the world, higher than all countries except India, China, and U.S. In the tropics, the 2015 Southeast Asian forested peatlands fires emitted 11 Teragrams of Carbon Dioxide (Tg CO2) per day, more than the daily fossil fuel CO₂ emissions rate of the European Union. This increasing source of carbon emissions and similar feedbacks further accelerate warming – reducing the time to international thresholds, like the 2.0 deg C Paris target, by multiple years.

With that kind of explosive growth, controlling—and eventually reducing—emissions from wildfires may seem insurmountable. However, we can generate strategic data and harness new technologies to identify and act on targeted opportunities for meaningful mitigation, so our efforts and investments achieve long-term impact.

It Takes a System Perspective

Forest wildfires emit an average of 725 Teragrams of Carbon (Tg C) per year (2002-2022), with an additional 106 Tg from global peatland fires. Individual years like 2023 can be much higher. As the climate warms, for every additional 1 deg. C, we expect additional emissions of about 500 Tg C per year. But the influence of wildfires on climate goes beyond emissions. Without a sophisticated understanding of the system-level impacts of wildfires, our mitigation efforts can be diluted or lost.

Many factors influence the impact of wildfires on climate, including vegetation changes, shifting the brightness of the surface, and long-term soil impacts. For example: In northern areas with long winters and little soil carbon, increased surface brightness (from snow replacing canopy) can temporarily overshadow the warmer-temperature “forcing” from greenhouse gasses. However, in areas with less snow (which is diminishing rapidly) and carbon-rich permafrost, the warming forcing from carbon emissions easily outweighs that temporary increase in surface brightness.

Soil carbon is also a critical factor, especially in vulnerable permafrost locations or tropical peatlands. Carbon from thawing soils can be emitted for years after a fire, potentially overwhelming the carbon from the fire itself. The rate and type of vegetation likely to recover plays into the long-term impact. 

This means two “identical” fires located in different contexts can have different impacts on global temperature, and over different timelines. If we don’t know how these things work, we risk using resources inefficiently and potentially lowering our cumulative impact.

We need to manage the impact of wildfires on the climate, and emissions in general, because increasing wildfire emissions impacts more than just the climate.

Smoke spreads wider than the fire itself. Direct human exposure to wildland fires has increased 40% globally between 2002 and 2021, with even higher rates in Africa. If unmitigated, fire carbon emissions push the number of premature deaths from wildfire smoke to an estimated 1.4 million people annually by 2099. How wildfires produce air pollution, impact biodiversity, and degrade watersheds (to name a few processes), are also not homogenous, but vary depending on fuels, weather, and local history.

These complexities are a scientific challenge. But they are also an opportunity to utilize targeted solutions in the locations where they will have the greatest impact. All these nuances are facets of an effective and rapid solution that drives change.

That’s why EDF is turning the approach to wildfire management on its head. By leading with climate, we are cutting the process off at the root, targeting the feedback directly while also reaping those ancillary benefits.

Driving Targeted Action

It is not economically sustainable to manage fires everywhere. Nor do we want to. Fires are an important ecological process, but one that is growing out of balance. Instead, we need to identify the areas where we can make the greatest impact and target our actions appropriately. Wildfires are rising fastest in the boreal, with emissions increasing nearly 200% in some regions, and parts of the tropics.

Across half of northern Canada, the weather that drives high-severity fires is now significantly more common than the 40-year average. But burned area and emissions are typically driven by a small number of very large, lightning-ignited fires. Approximately 73% of the burned area in the 2023 Canadian fires – which emitted 650 Tg C in one season – were from just 60 fire events. That is like the fourth largest emitting country in the world being dominated by just 60 factories – if we can eliminate those 60 events, we can maintain a healthy fire regime while simultaneously cutting down on hundreds of teragrams of carbon. That is a powerful opportunity that could be quite cost effective. Early initial estimates suggest the cost of reducing emissions at $13 per ton of avoided CO₂ in the Alaskan boreal.

In the tropics, guidance on when intentional and illegal fires are likely to escape, combined with stronger data on small fire locations from next generation satellite systems, can guide effective policy and enforcement. Warmer and drier conditions in the Amazon are beginning to offset reductions in deforestation, with pan-Amazon fires in 2024 emitting a record ~215 Tg C, and by 2050 burned area may double. Targeting emissions reductions through conservation efforts and integrated fire management in collaboration with local and Indigenous communities is key.

With the right data and tools fit for purpose, we can identify the highest leverage points and means of action and drive rapid change.

To bring those scientific insights to action, we need to rapidly identify fires and respond appropriately. EDF was instrumental in the initial design, scoping, and climate science component of FireSat, which is now run through the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. By 2030, Earth Fire Alliance expects to operate a constellation of more than 50 satellites that will identify and track fires by delivering near real-time, high-precision data faster than ever. This will give fire managers the information they need to apply policy-relevant science more efficiently and strategically.

We're building these tools with the intention of gathering data that will have meaningful impact. EDF recently convened nearly 50 global leaders in fire science, policy and management for a strategic planning meeting to move from fire data to climate impact, and the community engagement, economic and policy steps needed to augment the science.

There is a lot to do, but key, high-leverage opportunities to catalyze change are clear:

1. Quantifying priority landscapes and weather conditions where targeted effort will have disproportionate value via fire risk and carbon vulnerability mapping;
2. Analyzing the economic impacts to understand the value of this mitigation relative to other actions;
3. Identifying and pushing pilot landscapes for learning by doing;
4. Catalyzing local communities of practice, and
5. Pushing policy on the international stage.

EDF has already begun. We are developing research to quantify fire risk and carbon vulnerability in the North American boreal. We’re also estimating the impact and economic value of targeted management– taking those 60 fires as a case study of the future and identifying how and where strategic action could make a difference for carbon emissions and air quality. We’ve taken our research and the issue of increasing ecosystem emissions, like those from wildfires to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2025 and plan to do so again in 2026.

Much of the increase in forest wildfires—challenging us with increasing carbon emissions, human health impacts, ecosystem integrity—is wrapped up in our warming climate. It is a global issue that can seem overwhelming. But with strategic science and targeted action, we can make a meaningful impact by reducing the increase in wildfires efficiently and effectively.