Mega-fires may be contributing to climate change, UN report finds

(May 12, 2011) The growing number of mega-fires around the world may be contributing to global warming, a new United Nations report said, calling on governments to introduce comprehensive strategies to reduce the risk of such conflagrations.
The report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), released on Tuesday at an international conference in South Africa, said policy-makers need to improve their monitoring of carbon gas emissions from wildfires to better determine the potential climate change impacts. The report’s release follows a series of high-profile mega-fires, including the February 2009 Black Saturday blazes in Australia that killed 173 people and wiped out many towns, and record-setting fires last year in Russia that claimed the lives of 62 people and burned about 2.3 million hectares. The report examined recent mega-fires in Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Greece, Russia and the United States. Pieter van Lierop, a forestry officer with FAO warned that the problem was becoming more urgent, as weather experts indicated hotter and drier fire seasons. The report found that nearly all the mega-fires studied were started by people, sometimes deliberately to clear land for the purposes of agriculture or development.