Wildfire, Smoke and Mental Health in Canada

Janet Currie and Soodeh Saberian

No 33912, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study examines the relationship between wildfires and mental health-related hospitalizations in Canada from 2006 to 2018. Most previous estimates of the mental health costs of wildfire have focused on the impacts of exposure to PM₂.₅. We break new ground by highlighting other pathways for wildfires to affect mental health, including evacuation orders, direct local costs of fires, and climate anxiety, which is proxied using wildfire-related Twitter activity. We find that all these mechanisms affect mental health-related hospitalizations, with especially large impacts on hospitalizations for anxiety and substance abuse. Conditional on air quality, wildfire events that draw national attention worsen the mental health of susceptible people, even when they live far away. Elderly people and those with pre-existing health conditions that make them more vulnerable, are more strongly affected. The results indicate that climate anxiety stoked by wildfire events may account for much of the overall mental health cost. Accounting for these additional mechanisms does little to diminish the estimated effect of PM ₂.₅ from wildfire smoke, however, suggesting that the additional factors have effects on mental health that are in addition to those of PM₂.₅.

JEL-codes: I1 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
Note: EEE EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33912.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:33912

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33912
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 ().