CO2 from Australia Fires Equal the Country's Annual Emissions

Bushfires release huge carbon load

The Australian, Feb. 13, 2009

Victoria's bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - almost equal to Australia's industrial emission for an entire year.

Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in the next international agreement.

"Once you are starting to burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon," Professor Adams said.

In work for the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, he estimated the 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires could have put 20-30million tonnes of carbon (70-105 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere.

"That is far, far more than we're ever going to be able to sequester from planting trees or promoting carbon capture," he said.

"The 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires were burning land carrying 50 to 80 tonnes of carbon per hectare. "This time we are burning forests that are even more carbon-dense than last time, well over 100 tonnes above-ground carbon per hectare," he said.

Professor Adams said it was vital that more research was done into bushfires and carbon. "Not all of what is in the vegetation goes up, but you also lose much of the carbon in the litter and understorey and also some of the soil carbon," he said.

Carbon emissions from forest fires are not counted under the Kyoto Protocol. But he said he thought it likely they would be in future agreements.

"All informed scientific opinion suggests that whatever new protocol is signed (at the UN summit) in Copenhagen or elsewhere will include forest carbon, simply because to not do so would be to ignore one of the biggest threats to the global atmospheric pool of carbon dioxide, the release of carbon in fires."

Professor Adams said the counter argument had always been that new forests took up the carbon lost to the fire. "That is true to a point, but if the long-term fire regime changes -- we are now starting to have more fires -- we may completely change the carbon balance of the forest."

Carbon could also be sequestered in the soil as charcoal, and he said recent research had found most Australian soil carbon was actually charcoal.

"That really does change the way we think about soil carbon. We should be investigating the effects on fires in converting biomass into charcoal.

"One of the big unknowns is how fires interact with biomass carbon /to produce charcoal and ash, and how long that charcoal and ash lives in the soil."

He argued it was more important to investigate bushfires and the carbon cycle than it was to study carbon capture from coal-fired power stations.

"I think we are ignoring critical areas of research in favour of a technological solution. In this case, we need to better understand the natural cycles."

Scientists had recorded steep increases in global carbon dioxide emissions as a result of bushfires in Indonesia and Siberia, he said.