The year 2019 brought forth fires that ravaged the surface of the entire planet, from Alaska to Australia. All climate regions, from tropical to arctic, felt the force of this deadly element.
Thanks to technological innovations, new satellite monitoring tools implemented in space have made both the mapping and tracking of wildfires easier. The European Space Agency (ESA) for example, updated their tools for tracking fires through a system called the Sentinel-3 World Fire Atlas. In addition, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is similarly closely working with the online platform Global Forest Watch Fires (GFW Fires). In 2019, in the week 15-22 July, a whooping 782,366 fire alerts were sent via email to its subscribers. During that seven-day period, alerts were sent out to subscribers in Russia (178,484), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (136,087), Angola (109,512), and Zambia (52,801).
Fire is also often used for burning waste. Waste burning emits a significant number of dangerous carcinogens like dioxins and furans that push climate change ahead, increasing the melting speed of the polar regions due to soot and black carbon deposits.
