Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cClimate change is leading to warmer springs and earlier snowmelt across Canada\u2019s boreal ecosystems, which shortens the period when the exposed bright snow can reflect sunlight on post-fire landscapes,\u201d says\u00a0Gonsamo.<\/p>\n
How northern wildfires shape the climate<\/p>\n
Canada recently experienced its most extensive wildfire season on record in 2023, followed by the second-largest fire season in 2025 since national burned-area monitoring began in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
These record-breaking fire years highlight the rapidly escalating scale of wildfires across the northern latitudes.<\/p>\n
During the 2023 season, the fires emitted an extraordinary amount of carbon,\u00a0exceeding the annual fossil fuel emissions of\u00a0nearly every\u00a0country on Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cYet the climate impacts of these wildfires extend far beyond the carbon they emit,\u201d says lead author Max van Gerrevink, a PhD candidate in Earth and Climate science at VU Amsterdam.<\/p>\n
Many factors influence the impact of wildfires on climate, including vegetation changes, shifting the brightness of the surface, and long-term soil impacts. The research shows that, historically, extended spring snow cover in burn scars has helped cool the climate, a natural effect that the new study finds is now beginning to weaken as spring snow cover diminishes because of climate change.<\/p>\n
The consequences of retreating snow cover become especially clear at the scale of individual fires.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorically,\u00a0nearly half\u00a0of all Canadian wildfires reached a natural climatic break-even point, where snow-driven surface cooling fully offset the warming caused by fire-related emissions. Today, that proportion has fallen dramatically, to only about one in four or five fires,\u201d says\u00a0Sander Veraverbeke, the study\u2019s senior author and associate professor of Earth and Climate at VU Amsterdam.<\/p>\n
The study further shows that fires with higher carbon emissions per unit area are increasingly unlikely to achieve a full climatic offset. Compared to the 1960s, the albedo-driven cooling effect across northern forests has declined by\u00a0nearly 30\u00a0per cent. The mechanism is failing where it matters most \u2013 the fires releasing the most carbon\u00a0are\u00a0precisely those for which the snow cooling buffer has become least effective, a compounding disadvantage that grows more severe with every degree of warming.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe highest priority for addressing climate change\u00a0remains\u00a0aggressive global greenhouse gas reductions. At the same time, our findings highlight the urgent need to invest in smarter boreal fire management and forest stewardship practices that properly account for both carbon emissions and albedo effects, buying critical time for broader climate solutions while the snow-albedo cooling benefit is still available,\u201d\u00a0says\u00a0Gonsamo.<\/p>\n
The study authors highlight the need for targeted interventions focused on specific fires and landscapes where suppression pays the greatest climate dividend. Interventions\u00a0remain\u00a0both achievable and may in some cases be cost-effective.<\/p>\n
The work was funded by the European Research Council through a Consolidator grant under the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Diminishing periods of snow cover in northern forests, shortened by climate change, are poised to disrupt a delicate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-714234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}