Carbon counter: the cost of wildfires

Temperatures recently spiked in Europe and parts of the US. Spaniards sweltered at 46 degrees Celsius and Britons at an unprecedented 40 degrees. A heatwave circumstantially linked to global warming brought wildfires with it. Brave firefighters have been quelling the blazes.

But where were the carbon accountants when we needed them? Pondering the notional cost of environmental degradation is a favourite occupation of green-minded abacus rattlers. Yet with swaths of European forest aflame, they appeared oddly mute.

A useful starting point are data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. This offshoot of the European Commission uses satellite mapping of conflagrations to estimate carbon emissions. The total for the EU and UK so far this year is just under 6mn tons. That equates to a cost of €460mn at current EU carbon trading prices. The figure for the whole of 2021, when wildfires were also rife, would be almost €1bn.

You may quibble that it is short-sighted to simply price carbon emissions from scorched stands of trees. Forests have much wider value. They soak up floods. They prevent dust bowls. They support biodiversity. They give humans solace and recreation.

Adventurous bean counters try to estimate the value of wider environmental services provided by forests. Czech researchers have calculated a figure of around $3,000 per hectare, per year for local woodlands. Economic value of $1.5bn may therefore have gone up in smoke in wildfires so far this year across 515,000 hectares of Europe.

The charred, dirty secret of European wildfires is that they are natural phenomena as well as harbingers of climate change. Cost estimates for today’s wildfires may therefore need discounting by factors derived from the average yearly burn over decades.

The numbers are not huge in the first place. Mark Parrington of CAMS says only big conflagrations contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions. It is when rainforests are burning across Brazil and Indonesia that the balance sheet of the biosphere starts turning to ash itself.

Carbon counter is an occasional Lex series examining financial and environmental budgets and parallels between them. For other articles, see here.

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