Citation

O'Dell K, Bilsback K, Ford B, Martenies SE, Magzamen S, Fischer EV, Pierce JR. Geohealth 2021; 5(9): e2021GH000457.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, American Geophysical Union, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1029/2021GH000457

PMID

34504989

Abstract

As anthropogenic emissions continue to decline and emissions from landscape (wild, prescribed, and agricultural) fires increase across the coming century, the relative importance of landscape-fire smoke on air quality and health in the United States (US) will increase. Landscape fires are a large source of fine particulate matter (PM(2.5)), which has known negative impacts on human health. The seasonal and spatial distribution, particle composition, and co-emitted species in landscape-fire emissions are different from anthropogenic sources of PM(2.5). The implications of landscape-fire emissions on the sub-national temporal and spatial distribution of health events and the relative health importance of specific pollutants within smoke are not well understood. We use a health impact assessment with observation-based smoke PM(2.5) to determine the sub-national distribution of mortality and the sub-national and sub-annual distribution of asthma morbidity attributable to US smoke PM(2.5) from 2006 to 2018. We estimate disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for PM(2.5) and 18 gas-phase hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) in smoke. Although the majority of large landscape fires occur in the western US, we find the majority of mortality (74%) and asthma morbidity (on average 75% across 2006-2018) attributable to smoke PM(2.5) occurs outside the West, due to higher population density in the East. Across the US, smoke-attributable asthma morbidity predominantly occurs in spring and summer. The number of DALYs associated with smoke PM(2.5) is approximately three orders of magnitude higher than DALYs associated with gas-phase smoke HAPs. Our results indicate awareness and mitigation of landscape-fire smoke exposure is important across the US.

Language: en

Keywords

air quality; hazardous air pollutants; health impact assessment; PM2.5; wildfire smoke