Smoke from wildland-urban interface fires more deadly than remote wildfires

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The smoke from fires that blaze through the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has far greater health impacts than smoke from wildfires in remote areas, new research finds.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, estimates that emissions from WUI fires are proportionately about three times more likely to lead to annual premature deaths than emissions from wildfires in general. This is because the fires, and their associated emissions, are far closer to populated areas.

The work was conducted by an international team of researchers, led by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). The study drew on a database of WUI fires and advanced computer modeling techniques.

“Even though the emissions of WUI fires are relatively small globally, the health impacts are proportionately large because they’re closer to human populations,” said NSF NCAR scientist Wenfu Tang, the lead author. “Pollutants emitted by WUI fires such as particulate matter and the precursors to ozone are more harmful because they’re not dispersing across hundreds or thousands of miles.”

The study was funded by NOAA and NSF.

The spread of WUI fires

The wildland-urban interface is the geographic area where wildland vegetation and developed land come together or intermingle. WUI areas have been expanding on all populated continents and now constitute about 5% of the world’s land area, excluding Antarctica.

With this expansion have come devastating fires. Some of the deadliest WUI blazes in recent years include the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia that directly killed 173 people, the 2018 Attica fires in Greece that killed 104, and the 2023 Lahaina Fire in Hawaii that killed 100. At the beginning of this year, a disastrous outbreak of fires in Southern California burned an estimated 16,000 homes, businesses, and other structures, with estimates of financial losses ranging up to $250 billion or higher.

A previous study led by Tang used satellite observations and machine learning techniques to show that the fraction of global fires that occur in WUI areas has increased significantly this century. 

Building on that work, Tang and her colleagues wanted to estimate the health effects of the fire emissions beyond the immediate deaths. Certain pollutants associated with smoke, such as fine particulate matter and ground-level ozone, are especially harmful to cardiovascular and respiratory systems.

The researchers turned to an advanced NSF NCAR–based computer model, the Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA), to simulate pollutants from fires. Their modeling included carbon monoxide chemical tracers, which enabled them to estimate the sources of emissions and differentiate between wildland and WUI fires.

They also used a dataset of WUI fires in the recent two decades worldwide, which Tang and her colleagues developed last year. 

To compare emissions of WUI fires with those from wildland fires, the researchers simulated four scenarios. These consisted of: no fires, both WUI and wildland fires, WUI fires only, and wildland fires only. The difference between all fires and just wildland fires indicated the impacts of WUI fire emissions.

The results showed that WUI fire emissions constituted 3.1% of all fire emissions across the six populated continents in 2020. However, the fractional contribution of WUI fire emissions to premature deaths was 8.8% of all fire emissions because of how many people were affected by smoke from WUI fires.

The numbers varied by continent depending on the proximity of dense populations to WUI fires. In North America, for example, WUI fires represented 6% of all fires and 9.3 % of premature deaths from emissions. In Europe, however, those numbers were 11.4% and 13.7%, respectively.

A critical factor that Tang wants to examine next is the difference in emissions from wildland fires that consume trees and other vegetation as opposed to WUI fires that burn down structures that often contain additional toxic substances. The smoke from different burned materials may have widely varying impacts on human health.

“It is very important to have an emission inventory that explicitly accounts for the burning of structures,” Tang said. “We need to know what is being burned in order to determine what is going up in smoke.”

About the study

Title: Disproportionately large impacts of wildland-urban interface fire emissions on global air
quality and human health
Authors: Wenfu Tang, Louisa K. Emmons, Christine Wiedinmyer, Debatosh B. Partha, Yaoxian
Huang, Cenlin He, Junzhe Zhang, Kelley C. Barsanti, Benjamin Gaubert, Duseong S.
Jo, Jun Zhang, Rebecca Buchholz, Simone Tilmes, Francis Vitt, Claire Granier, Helen M. Worden, and Pieternel F. Levelt
Publication: Science Advances

This material is based upon work supported by the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, a major facility sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
 

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