Mortality Burden From Wildfire Smoke Under Climate Change

Minghao Qiu, Jessica Li, Carlos F. Gould, Renzhi Jing, Makoto Kelp, Marissa Childs, Mathew Kiang, Sam Heft-Neal, Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke

No 32307, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Wildfire activity has increased in the US and is projected to accelerate under future climate change. However, our understanding of the impacts of climate change on wildfire smoke and health remains highly uncertain. We quantify the past and future mortality burden in the US due to wildfire smoke fine particulate matter (PM2.5). We construct an ensemble of statistical and machine learning models that link variation in climate to wildfire smoke PM2.5, and empirically estimate smoke PM2.5-mortality relationships using georeferenced data on all recorded deaths in the US from 2006 to 2019. We project that climate-driven increases in future smoke PM2.5 could result in 27,800 excess deaths per year by 2050 under a high warming scenario, a 76% increase relative to estimated 2011-2020 averages. Cumulative excess deaths from wildfire smoke PM2.5 could exceed 700,000 between 2025-2055. When monetized, climate-induced smoke deaths result in annual damages of $244 billion by mid-century, comparable to the estimated sum of all other damages in the US in prior analyses. Our research suggests that the health cost of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the US.

JEL-codes: Q51 Q53 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-big, nep-dem, nep-env and nep-hea
Note: EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32307.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32307

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32307
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().