New Inventories of Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions through Biomass Burning in 2001–2020

Recently, the effect of large-scale fires on the global environment has attracted attention. Satellite observation data are used for global estimation of fire CO₂ emissions, and available data sources are increasing. Although several CO₂ emission inventories have already been released, various remote sensing data were used to create the inventories depend on the studies. We created eight global CO₂ emission inventories through fires from 2001 to 2020 by combining input data sources, compared them with previous studies, and evaluated the effect of input sources on CO₂ emission estimation. CO₂ emissions were estimated using a method that combines the biomass density change (by the repeated fires) with the general burned area approach. The average annual CO₂ emissions of the created eight inventories were 8.40 ± 0.70 Pg CO₂ year⁻¹ (±1 standard deviation), and the minimum and maximum emissions were 3.60 ± 0.67 and 14.5 ± 0.83 Pg CO₂ year⁻¹, respectively, indicating high uncertainty. CO₂ Emissions obtained from four previous inventories were within ±1 standard deviation in the eight inventories created in this study. Input datasets, especially biomass density, affected CO₂ emission estimation. The global annual CO₂ emissions from two biomass maps differed by 60% (Maximum). This study assesses the performance of climate and fire models by revealing the uncertainty of fire emission estimation from the input sources.