By Olamide Francis
A wildfire is an uncontrolled fire that burns in the wildland vegetation, often in rural areas. Wildfires can burn in forests, grasslands, savannas, and other ecosystems, and have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years. They are not limited to a particular continent or environment. Wildfires can burn in vegetation located both in and above the soil.
Wildfires can start with a natural occurrence—such as a lightning strike—or a human-made spark. However, it is often the weather conditions that determine how much a wildfire grows. Wind, high temperatures, topography and little rainfall are some of the factors that can leave trees, shrubs, fallen leaves, and limbs dried out and primed to fuel a fire.
Wildfires that burn near communities can become dangerous and even deadly if they grow out of control. For example, the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California destroyed almost the entire town of Paradise; in total, 86 people died.
Wildfires emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that will continue to warm the planet well into the future. They damage forests that would otherwise remove CO2 from the air. And they inject soot and other aerosols into the atmosphere, with complex effects on warming and cooling.
To be sure, the leading cause of global warming remains overwhelmingly the burning of fossil fuels. That warming lengthens the fire season, drying and heating the forests.
Although the exact quantities are difficult to calculate, scientists estimate that wildfires emitted about 8 billion tons of CO2 per year for the past 20 years. In 2017, total global CO2 emissions reached 32.5 billion tons, according to the International Energy Agency. Wildfires make up 5 to 10 percent of annual global CO2 emissions each year.
Extreme fires can release huge amounts of CO2 in a very short time. California fire experts estimate that the blazes that devastated Northern California’s wine country in October 2017 emitted as much CO2 in one week as all of California’s cars and trucks do over the course of a year.
Harmful Effects of Wildfires
The United Nations said that, “Smoke from wildfires causes air pollution and is bad for your health no matter where you live. Wildfires release harmful pollutants including particulate matter and toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and non-methane organic compounds into the atmosphere. Wildfires can cause displacement, stress and anguish to people who have to flee them, beyond those who suffer direct impacts.
“The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported on 23 September 2019 that wild forest and peatland fires across Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia, were putting nearly 10 million children at risk from air pollution.”
It also said that not everyone can get protection from wildfires.
“In many countries, escape and protection from air pollution is a privilege not everyone can afford or has equal access to. Air purifiers and good quality pollution masks can be expensive. Those who can’t afford to take time off work may not be able to avoid areas cloaked in smoke, for example,” the UN said
In November 2019, the Enugu State Coordinator of The National Environmental Standard and Regulation Enforcement Agency (NESREA), Mr Pele Egbegari, stated in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that human activities such as deforestation, bush burning, and increase in greenhouse gases as major causes of climate change.
“When the plants are deforested, there will be no longer sinking for carbon dioxide. This causes an increase in the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“They end up absorbing heat from the sun thereby making it unbearable for people.
“Human activities actually affect the increase in greenhouse gases leading to global warming,” he said.
Egbegari said that some of the effects of desertification included flooding; adding that many lives and valuable property had been lost to flood.
“There is an increase in the number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) due to flooding and other violence and people are made to move outside their ancestral homes.
“The climate change has come to be, we cannot do anything to stop it completely, but we can take action to either mitigate it or adapt to it.
“The answer to it is reforestation. Let us stop deforesting our plants, instead we should plant more,” Egbegari said.
