Wildfires will make the land absorb much less carbon, even if we keep warming below 1.5°C

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-10-03 19:00

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One of the aims of the Paris Agreement was to 'pursue efforts' to keep global warming below 1.5°C, but even this ambitious target would not stop the land's ability to absorb carbon weakening as wildfires become fiercer and more frequent, according to UK and Brazilian scientists. The climate simulations used to determine the 1.5°C Paris target lacked information about fire and vegetation, they say, so they ran simulations that included that data. They found the global warming level at which fire began to impact the land's ability to absorb carbon was 1.07 °C above pre-industrial levels, and that fire is already playing a major role in hampering that ability. They estimate that including fire reduces our remaining carbon budget by 5%, or 25 gigatonnes of CO2, if we want to limit warming to 1.5°C, or by 5%, or 64 gigatonnes of CO2, to stay below 2°C. Limiting warming to 1.5 °C is still essential for avoiding the worst of climate change, they say, but in many cases we are already seeing significant disruption to Earth's ecosystems.