• Tracking
• post

New Mexico hit hard as wildfires sweep parched Southwest

Wind-driven wildfires in northern New Mexico burned multiple homes and forced hundreds to flee mountain villages as blazes raged in the parched U.S. Southwest at a time when the fire season is just beginning.

Two wildfires merged northwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico, on Friday and raced through 15 miles of forest driven by winds of over 75 mph (121 kph).

Air tankers and ground crews were able to fight the blaze on Saturday after a yet-untold number of houses burned south of the village of Mora.

To the northeast, a fire about 35 miles east of Taos doubled in size to become the largest burning in the United States, forcing the evacuation of a scout ranch and threatening several villages.

The wildfires are the most severe of nearly two dozen in the U.S. Southwest and raised concerns the region was in for a brutal fire year as a decades-long drought combined with abundant dry vegetation.

"Fire is still traveling very quickly, it is imperative residents comply with evacuation orders," San Miguel and Mora counties said in a news release.

The Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires combined to burn 42,341 acres, an area larger than Florida's Disney World. The blaze turned east on Saturday, giving crews a chance to bulldoze fire breaks to protect Mora and other villages to the north, said incident commander Jayson Coil.

Climate change has lowered winter snowpacks and allowed larger and more extreme fires to start earlier in the year, according to scientists. read more

West of Taos, the Cooks Peak fire nearly doubled in size to 48,672 acres, forcing the evacuation of the Philmont Scout Ranch and threatening the village of Cimarron.

Heavy rain and floods in Afghanistan kill 22, destroy hundreds of homes

Heavy rain and flooding has killed 22 people, destroyed hundreds of homes and damaged crops in Afghanistan, which is already facing a humanitarian crisis, a disaster management official said on Thursday.

The Taliban government, struggling to cope with the disaster that has affected more than a third of its provinces, will approach international relief organisations for help, officials said.

"Due to flooding and storms in 12 provinces, 22 people have died and 40 injured," said Hassibullah Shekhani, head of communications and information at Afghanistan's National Disaster Management Authority.

The rain and flooding was particularly severe in the western provinces of Badghis and Faryab and the northern province of Baghlan.

Afghanistan has been suffering from drought in recent years, made worse by climate change, with low crop yields raising fears of serious food shortages. The weather has exacerbated problems of poverty caused by decades of war and then a drop in foreign aid and the freezing of assets abroad after the Taliban took over, and U.S.-led forces withdrew, in August.

Vast forest losses in 2021 imperil global climate targets, report says

The world lost an area of forest the size of the U.S. state of Wyoming last year, as wildfires in Russia set all-time records and Brazilian deforestation of the Amazon remains high, a global forest monitoring project report said on Thursday.

Global Forest Watch, which is backed by the non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI) and draws on forest data collected by the University of Maryland, said in a report that roughly 253,000 square kilometers (97,683 square miles) of forest were lost in 2021.

Forests provide a buffer against climate change because of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide that they absorb and their rapid destruction is putting global climate targets at risk, WRI analysts said in a briefing.

The high level of 2021 forest loss, while roughly flat with 2020, does not match up with the commitment announced by more than 100 world leaders at a United Nations climate summit last November to halt deforestation by 2030, the analysts said.

"We are not seeing the downward decline (in forest loss) we would expect to see those results," said Rod Taylor, WRI's global forests program director, referring to the 2030 commitment.

The causes of the reduction in forest cover include human and natural causes, as well as deforestation, wildfires and other destruction.

Loss of 37,500 square kilometers of old-growth tropical rainforest is particularly concerning because the dense vegetation holds high levels of carbon, WRI analysts said.

Although that destruction was slightly lower than 2020, it caused carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to all of the fossil fuel India burns in a year, the report said.

That destruction was overwhelmingly from human's permanently clearing the land, with more than 40% of that loss in Brazil.

Cold boreal forests found in the far northern regions like Canada, Russia and Alaska lost more than 80,000 square kilometers of area last year, the highest level since records began in 2001.

The majority of that loss was due to record fires in Russia, driven by hotter and drier conditions that are likely linked to climate change, the report said.

"It's hugely worrying," Taylor said.

"We're seeing fires burning more frequently, more intensively and more broadly than they ever would under normal conditions."