The wildfires in Canada burned 18.5 million hectares or about 71,000 square miles--an area the size of Washington State.
As of early October, 18.5 million hectares had burned across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre Inc. Preliminary estimates from Natural Resources Canada show emissions from those fires amounted to roughly 2,400 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent – more than triple the 670 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent reported as Canada’s total emissions for 2021 in the most recent National Inventory Report.
