Nov 1, 2013
Wildfire smoke and health impacts: A closer look at fire attributes and their marginal effects
by
,
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
- Examines the impact of basic fire attributes, such as distance and fuel type, on air quality and health outcomes
- Uses detailed information on 24 large-scale wildfires that sent smoke plumes to the Reno/Sparks area of Northern Nevada over a 4-year period
- Relates the daily acreage burned by these fires to daily data on air pollutants and local hospital admissions
- Computes the per-acre health cost of wildfires of different attributes using information on medical expenses
- Finds that patient counts can be causally linked to fires as far as 200–300 miles from the impact area
- Finds that, as expected, the marginal impact per acre burned generally diminishes with distance and for fires with lighter fuel loads
- Results highlight the importance of allowing for temporal lags between fire occurrence and pollutant levels