Wildfires

Wildfires - Tunisia

Tunisia recorded 255 forest fires across the country’s governorates, destroying more than 5,317 hectares, an increase of 11% from a year ago. Agricultural crop fires amounted to 352 fires that destroyed about 620 hectares, an increase of 9% from last year, in the period from the beginning of January 2022 to mid-September.

Wildfires - Arctic

Smoke from hundreds of wildfires has darkened skies over the Alaskan interior this summer with the state experiencing its fastest start to the fire season on record amid hot and dry conditions.

Tens of thousands of lightning strikes ignited the majority of active fires, according to the Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service. By late August, more than 1.2 million hectares had burned across the state – roughly triple what is seen in an average year but no longer unusual in a warming world.

With climate change raising Arctic temperatures faster than the global average, wildfires are shifting poleward where the flames blaze through boreal forest and tundra and release vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the carbon-rich organic soil.

Last year, Siberian wildfires scorched some 168 000 square kilometres of Siberian forest, or an area nearly the size of Cambodia. While cloaking the region for months in acrid smoke, some of which reached the North Pole for the first time, those wildfires set a sobering new record for the share of carbon emissions from the world's highest latitudes.

The Republic of Sakha was the Arctic region hardest hit by fires, which consumed vast swaths of larch forest. By summer's end, nearly 50% more carbon had been released in this region than in any year in the past two decades.