An astonishing number of trees are killed by lightning every year

Lightning is shaping our forests more than anyone expected. Every year, about 320 million trees around the world are killed by lightning – not burned down in firestorms, but knocked out by direct strikes. 

That’s a massive number, and it’s only counting trees that die from lightning itself – not the ones lost to fires that lightning later ignites.

The new estimate comes from a team of researchers who created the first global model to calculate lightning-caused tree deaths. 

A silent killer in the woods

The research suggests that we’ve been underestimating the ecological punch that lightning packs. And if lightning strikes become more frequent as the climate warms -as many projections suggest – this overlooked threat could grow even bigger.

Most of us think of lightning as something dramatic with loud cracks of thunder and intense flashes of light. However, much of lightning’s impact on forests has gone unnoticed. 

When a tree gets hit, the damage can be internal – its tissue fried from the inside out. The tree might stay standing for a while, slowly dying without any outward sign of what happened. In dense forests, those deaths blend into the background.

Scientists had long known that lightning was killing trees, but they didn’t know how many. Field observations in individual forests offered glimpses, but there was no way to connect the dots globally. 

Estimating lightning damage in forests

A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich took a different approach. Instead of relying only on fieldwork, they used a global vegetation model and combined it with data on how lightning is distributed around the planet. 

Next, the researchers looked at how trees respond to being hit, including how many survive, how many die, and how long it takes.

The team estimated where lightning does the most damage and how it affects forest health on a global scale. 

“We’re now able not only to estimate how many trees die from lightning strikes annually, but also to identify the regions most affected and assess the implications for global carbon storage and forest structure,” said Andreas Krause, the study’s lead author.

The carbon cost of lightning strikes

Beyond killing trees, lightning strikes are also shaking up the planet’s carbon balance. When trees die and decay, they release carbon dioxide. 

According to the study, lightning-related tree deaths emit somewhere between 0.77 and 1.09 billion tons of CO₂ per year. That’s nearly as much as the 1.26 billion tons released annually by the burning of living plants in wildfires.

To put that in perspective, the total carbon emissions from wildfires each year – including deadwood and soil material – add up to about 5.85 billion tons. 

Ultimately, lightning-related emissions are a significant piece of the climate puzzle – one that’s often left out of critically important discussions.

Lightning in tropical forests 

Right now, most of the tree loss is happening in tropical forests. These areas have high lightning activity year-round, especially in places like the Congo Basin and the Amazon. 

Tropical trees also tend to be taller and more likely to get struck, but the pattern could shift. 

“Most climate models project an increase in lightning frequency in the coming decades, so it’s worth paying closer attention to this largely overlooked disturbance,” said Krause. 

The increase won’t be spread evenly. Models predict that lightning will become more frequent in temperate and boreal regions too – places like Canada, Russia, and parts of the U.S. – where trees haven’t historically had to deal with much lightning.

Forests that are already stressed by drought, heat, and pests might soon be facing another problem. And since trees in colder regions tend to grow more slowly, their recovery from lightning-related losses could take decades.

Lightning damage to the world’s forests

This isn’t just about counting dead trees. Forests are crucial carbon sinks, soaking up CO₂ and helping to cool the planet. If a few hundred million trees start dying every year from lightning alone, that’s going to chip away at their ability to store carbon.

And unlike wildfires, which are often visible from satellites and leave behind large scars, lightning deaths are subtle. They happen one by one, scattered across the forest floor. That makes them harder to monitor – and easier to ignore.

This study marks the first serious attempt to measure the damage, and it suggests we may need to rethink how we model forests, especially as the climate shifts. 

Lightning might not be as showy as a wildfire, but its quiet impact could have lasting effects on the world’s forests – and the carbon cycle they support.

The study is published in the journal Global Change Biology.

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