Top Highlights

• Few people have spent more time wrestling with the messy math of land-based emissions than Werner Kurz.
• Canada can experience massive greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires and other disturbances, a problem that climate change is exacerbating. In the severe fire year of 2017, emissions from wildfires nearly equaled the entire country’s emissions from all forms of energy use.
• Starting in 2017, Canada stopped counting emissions from many wildfires toward its U.N. pledges, arguing that most are beyond human control. That change, implemented retroactively, made all the numbers drop significantly.
• Canada has submitted this report annually since 2003, and it has revised the emission numbers repeatedly. Until 2017, they followed a similar curve.
• For 2014, an extreme fire year, Canada lowered its estimates from 48.7 million tons emitted into the atmosphere to negative 34.3 million tons, absorbed into the land.

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