https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-...
>Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon
Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US.
Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back.
The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement.
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Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk.
Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up.
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Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.
Probably impractical at scale though..
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However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't).
Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc.
You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.