Bushfires in Australia do not seem to be coming under control. The bushfires have been raging since September 2019 and they have already burnt more than twice as much land as the fires in the Amazon rain forest.
Since September, about six million hectares of land has been destroyed across Australia. In comparison, close to three million hectares of land burnt in the Brazilian Amazon in summer of 2019. The burning of Amazon rainforest created quite an outrage across the world, the same does not seem to have happened in the case of Australia bushfires.?
The fires in Amazon impacted the ecosystem significantly, the bushfires in Australia have not only wiped out close to half a billion animals but impacted human settlement too.?
The mass of land destroyed has been compared to the size of Belgium, to help Europeans understand the scope of the disaster. According to Insider, the land burnt is nearly six times the land that was destroyed during the 2018 wildfires in California, where 8,00,000 hectares of land burned.?
According to Time report- if comparison of the land lost is to be made to the states in U.S. states than the area burned in Australia is the size of the U.S. states of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.?
Coming to how the fires are going to impact the environment- Amazon fires released about 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Australia bushfires have already released more than twice that number-? 350 million metric tons of CO2. According to the Daily Mail, this is about 1% of the global carbon emissions since 2019. As more land burns, the warmer the planet gets we are more in the risk of bigger fires.?
The situation in Australia is grave, and help needs to pour from anyone who can contribute in the slightest way.?