The mountain pine beetle outbreak along the Rocky Mountain range is having a serious impact on climate change, Canadian scientists have said.
Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from the Canadian Forest Service said the damage and destruction caused by the current beetle epidemic is turning Canada’s forests from a carbon sink to a carbon source, and could see as much as 270 megatonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by 2020.
The beetles attack lodge-pole pine and jack-pine trees and have already destroyed 50,000 square miles of forest in western Canada.
“Insect outbreaks such as this represent an important mechanism by which climate change may undermine the ability of northern forests to take up and store atmospheric carbon and, as such, impacts should be accounted for in large-scale modelling analyses,” the researchers said.
