A kangaroo crosses the road near Australian firefighters, December 10, 2019. - Rick Rycroft / AP / SIPA

  • The fires in Australia have already burned eight million hectares.
  • Millions of animals have died and the ecosystem has been severely damaged.
  • 2019 promises to be the warmest year on record in Australia.

Eight million hectares. This is the extent of the damage caused by fires in Australia since September. This is three times more than the area that went up in smoke this summer in the Amazon. To take a picture closer to us, it is as if the whole island of Ireland has been completely burned. While the Australian authorities do not expect a real lull for several weeks, thousands of people have been forced to flee or have been evacuated in an emergency. This Monday, nearly 3,000 reservists were mobilized to help firefighters already exhausted by weeks of fighting the flames.

Beyond the impressive images of the fires, we must also ask the question of the short, medium and long term consequences for the Australian ecosystem and for global warming. Concerning the first problem, a number struck the minds: according to a team of scientists from the University of Sidney, at least 480 million animals were "affected" by the fires. This does not mean that they are all dead, but that they have lost their habitat and food sources, for example. Thus, the Australian Minister for the Environment estimated at the end of December that around 30% of the koalas in the coastal region of New South Wales were dead.

In southeast Australia, hundreds of dead animals lie on the side of the roads. It is estimated that almost 500 million animals have already been killed by fires, burned or poisoned by smoke. (via The new Batlow Hotel on Facebook) pic.twitter.com/pJamp9gOBQ

- Cities Weather (@Meteovilles) January 6, 2020

"The very basis of the ecosystem, the forest, the bush, have completely disappeared"

"Some affected species are endemic, that is to say present only in Australia, recalls Franck Courchamp, director of research at the CNRS and ecologist. We know the koala, the kangaroo, but there is also the emu, the wombat ... Many species that were already threatened before are even more vulnerable now. The sudden loss of a whole part of its population and its habitat is what tilts a species towards extinction. Some images, like those of an Australian firefighter giving a drink to a thirsty koala and survivor of the flames, have also gone viral in recent days.

This mass disappearance of animals will eventually pose a problem. Franck Courchamp spins the metaphor: "It's like a bolt in an airplane: if you have one falling it is not too serious, but if several bolts come off at the same time, there you can lose the whole structure. Biodiversity is the same: if you lose the “engineer” species that make the ecosystem work, you are putting the system in danger. In addition, with these extremely intense fires, the seeds of the plants died before germinating, the roots burned. The very base of the ecosystem, the forest, the bush, have completely disappeared. "

And to make matters worse, the fires obviously caused massive emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. According to a NASA study cited by the Guardian Australia , around 250 million tonnes of CO2 were emitted by bush and forest fires alone. This amount corresponds to that rejected by all of Australia - excluding fires - in six months. "I have many colleagues in Australia who are absolutely devastated," continues Franck Courchamp. You have all this CO2 emitted by fires. But in the long term, the absence of burnt forests to reabsorb CO2 is just as problematic ”. In 2019, the period from January to November was the second driest on record since 1902 in Australia as well as the hottest on record.

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