Countries can classify emissions from wildfires (and subsequent removals from regrowth) as a memo item in their national greenhouse gas inventories, excluding them from the total. So far Australia and Canada have done this - including Australia's massive 2020 wildfire.
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And yeah, good point about "natural". There are many unresolved issues there... here is a box we wrote in the UNEP Gap Report 2024.
An interesting way to approach the accounting of wild fire emissions is to look at how countries allocate carbon credits to forests.
If a forest can be seen as a carbon sink and accounted for in national accounts, then why doesn’t it count as a carbon source when it burns down?
https://climateanalytics.org/press-releases/why-offsets-dont-work-new-analysis
Thanks for your important work.
Portugal 2017 (~18MtCO2)