Wildfire Smoke Linked to 20K Deaths, $200B in Damages

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(TNS) — Most Pittsburghers remember when, in June 2023, smoke from wildfires burning thousands of Canadian hectares settled into Pittsburgh, spiking the Air Quality Index to above 200 — considered “very unhealthy” — and transforming the sky into a gritty haze.

During that time, Nicholas Muller, an economics and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in air quality, and his colleagues were working to build a model to quantify how this smoke was impacting the nation’s most vulnerable groups.

A culmination of four years of research, the analysis was published this March in Nature and suggests wildfire smoke and smoke from prescribed burns across the country in 2017 were associated with 20,000 premature deaths and $200 billion in damages.

“This study really takes the first macro view of wildfire smoke in terms of impact and totals it up for the country,” said Muller.

The issue has become relevant yet again, following the Los Angeles wildfires that burned more than 50,000 acres in January, and the wildfires currently tearing through thousands of acres in the New Jersey wilderness.

Wildfire smoke has unique and dangerous health impacts, as its composition differs from traditional particle air pollutants.

“Air pollution in general causes a wide range of adverse health outcomes,” said Suzanne Paulson, professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA and an atmospheric chemist for more than 30 years. “The most important ones are loss of life and cardiovascular problems.”

Paulson, a researcher studying how air pollution and wildfire smoke can promote inflammation in the body, was not involved in the CMU research.

“We pretty much always find that fire particles are particularly active and more problematic than garden variety air pollution,” said Paulson. “They are always in a class of their own in terms of how much they can create inflammation.”

Exposure to wildfire smoke can lead to shortness of breath, bronchitis, exacerbations of respiratory conditions like asthma, and heart problems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

When air pollution increases, so does the risk of death, said Muller.

For the CMU study, researchers built a statistical model based on large swaths of 2017 data from the National Emission Inventory, a database maintained by the EPA that acts like a census for all emissions in the U.S., and census data about where people live, how old they are and various factors of social vulnerability.

They calculated how vulnerable certain groups were based on census and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data about their disability status, housing type, transportation access and income levels. This allowed researchers to discern which areas of the U.S. were bearing the brunt of wildfire smoke impacts, and which populations were most impacted.

Native Americans, older Americans and Black Americans were more likely to fare the worst of wildfire smoke and prescribed burn smoke, according to the study. Though senior citizens accounted for just 16% of the U.S. population, they accrued 75% of the damages from smoke in 2017, the study found, amounting to a total of $200 billion in damages.

Of total damages related to the smoke, half of it originated from wildfire smoke and the other half from prescribed burns, a percentage that shocked researchers, who expected the breakdown to favor wildfire smoke.

Impact from smoke was also heavily dependent on location. The majority of wildfire emissions of fine particulate matter at 2.5 micrometers (PM 2.5) — 75%, according to the study — was situated among five states in the West. Most of the emissions from the prescribed burns were from more southern states: Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Florida, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. This could be why Native Americans were in part disproportionately affected, because of their proximity to prescribed burns in rural areas.

Muller said that while there’s evidence that people are willing to spend money to lessen their risk of dying from fire or smoke, the magnitude of those costs was shocking.

“Damages from pollution produced by wildfire smoke were large,” he said. “These [air pollution] damages from wildfires are comparable to the [air pollution damages] from the entire manufacturing sector in the U.S., which is staggering.”

Karen Clay, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in air pollution, said she thought the paper brought useful new information to the field — which previously hasn’t had a study that quantified how different populations have been impacted by wildfire smoke.

“It really tells the story in a much more detailed way,” said Clay, who was not involved in the study. “It was very convincing for that reason. And I’m not just saying that because they’re my colleagues,” she joked.

The analysis addresses common misconceptions that wildfire-related deaths occur only from the fire and flames, and that damages are derived from the costs of destroyed structures alone.

“I think the biggest [misconception] is that the bulk of the monetary damage comes from the fire itself, through the destruction of property and the direct loss of life,” said Muller. “This paper makes a strong argument that that’s not the case.”

Instead, damages were driven by health care costs and society’s willingness to pay to reduce mortality risk. California, Florida, Oklahoma and Oregon accrued a majority of the damages, and the cost of damages increased with age.

Clay said the study will influence how people think about wildfire smoke damages moving forward.

“You can imagine this could really help state policymakers because of the depth of the analysis,” she said.

While the study pulled from 2017 data, which was the most recent available at the time it began, Muller said they have already begun analyzing the latest iteration of data from 2020.

“In a year-over-year comparison, the occurrence of fires and impacts from smoke are going to be variable,” he said. “Clearly the science has shown and supported the notion that increased drought and stress on forests in the West make the likelihood and severity of wildfires more likely to grow over time. If there aren’t actions taken, the impacts we reported are likely to increase in tandem with this trend.”

Climate change has made wildfires more frequent and worsened their severity, increasing the need for novel solutions. The researchers have communicated the study’s results to air quality advocacy groups like the Breathe Project and the Cancer and Environment Network of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

“There are going to be more wildfires no matter what we do,” said Paulson. “It’s an untenable amount of area to try to control.”

Paulson added that she remains “cautiously optimistic” but thinks things will get worse before they improve.

Muller expressed concern about the current state of trust in science and scientific authority, potentially stymying progress.

“On a broader scale, [the study is] yet another alarm that we need to pay attention to addressing climate change,” said Paulson. “We can only do so much with forest management. As climate changes, more of these things will just become inevitable.”