21st Century drought-related fires counteract the decline of Amazon deforestation carbon emissions

Abstract

Tropical carbon emissions are largely derived from direct forest clearing processes. Yet, emissions from drought-induced forest fires are, usually, not included in national-level carbon emission inventories. Here we examine Brazilian Amazon drought impacts on fire incidence and associated forest fire carbon emissions over the period 2003–2015. We show that despite a 76% decline in deforestation rates over the past 13 years, fire incidence increased by 36% during the 2015 drought compared to the preceding 12 years. The 2015 drought had the largest ever ratio of active fire counts to deforestation, with active fires occurring over an area of 799,293 km2. Gross emissions from forest fires (989 ± 504 Tg CO2 year−1) alone are more than half as great as those from old-growth forest deforestation during drought years. We conclude that carbon emission inventories intended for accounting and developing policies need to take account of substantial forest fire emissions not associated to the deforestation process.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Aragao, LEOC Anderson, LO Fonseca, MG Rosan, TM Vedovato, LB Wagner, FH Silva, CVJ Silva Junior, CHL Arai, E Aguiar, AP Barlow, J Berenguer, E Deeter, MN Domingues, LG Gatti, L Gloor, M https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9384-6341 Malhi, Y Marengo, JA Miller, JB Phillips, OL https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8993-6168 Saatchi, S
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 20 November 2017 Published (online): 13 February 2018 Published: 13 February 2018
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number EU - European Union EXT 448221 NERC NE/F005806/1 EU - European Union 291585 (ERC 2011 ADG) Royal Society No External Ref
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	24 Nov 2017 14:10
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2018 08:39
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Publishing Group
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-017-02771-y
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:124432

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21st Century drought-related fires counteract the decline of Amazon deforestation carbon emissions

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