The equivalent of 16 football pitches is now lost every minute due to the fact that forests are burning twice as much global tree cover as 20 years ago, according to data released Wednesday Aug 17 by PARIS.
The research showed in unprecedented detail how wildfires have progressed over the past two decades, with the blazes claiming an estimated three million hectares each year - an area the size of Belgium compared to 2001.
The study showed that a majority of tree cover loss is occurring in the boreal forests that cover much of Russia, Canada and Alaska, which are among the largest stores of carbon on Earth.
Scientists from the University of Maryland used satellite imagery to map areas of lost tree cover, including those burned by stand-replacing forest fires.
These fires kill all or most of the forest's canopy and cause long-term changes to the forest structure and soil chemistry.
The data shows 2021 to be one of the worst years for forest fires since the turn of the century, causing 9.3 million hectares of tree cover loss in the world.
According to the data, it was more than a third of all the forest lost last year, according to Global Forest Watch and the World Resources Institute research group.
James McCarthy, an analyst at Global Forest Watch, told AFP that forest fires are getting worse in the world.
The European Union's satellite monitoring service said last week that Western Europe had experienced record fire activity in 2022, with tens of thousands of hectares of forest lost in France, Spain and Portugal.
The researchers said climate change was likely to be a major factor in the increase in fire activity, with extreme heat waves that render forests tinder dry already five times more likely today than a century and a half ago.
The drier conditions lead to higher emissions from fires, further exacerbating climate change as part of a feedback loop they said.
The vast majority of the fire-related tree cover loss over the last two decades occurred in boreal regions, likely because high-latitude regions are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.
Russia lost 5.4 million hectares of tree cover last year due to fires, the highest on record, with an increase of 31 per cent over 2020.
The study said that the record-breaking loss was due to prolonged heatwaves that would have been practically impossible without human-induced climate change.
The team warned that increased changes to climate and fire activity could turn boreal forests from a carbon sink into a source for carbon emissions.
Over the past hundreds of years, carbon has accumulated in the soil and has been protected by a moist layer on top, said McCarthy.
These more frequent and serious fires are burning off this top layer and it is exposing that carbon in the soil. The study showed that tree cover loss in the tropics has increased by around 5 per cent this century - about 36,000 hectares a year.
Deforestation and forest degradation are some of the main drivers of forest loss in these regions.
The researchers said that forest loss from deforestation was making it more likely that forests would be lost to fire, as the practice leads to higher regional temperatures and drier vegetation.
They want governments to improve forest resilience by ending forest deforestation and limiting local forest management practices that include controlled burning, which can easily burn out of control, especially during dry spells.
"The forests are one of the best defences we have against climate change," McCarthy said.