Climate impacts – forest fires as a health risk

Worldwide, the severity of forest fires has increased over the last 20 years, although not necessarily the area burned. Australia, South America, Siberia and western North America are particularly affected, but southern Europe also repeatedly experiences devastating forest fires. Take Greece, for example, where one of the worst fires in the country’s recent history raged in August 2023. 966 square kilometers of forests, bushland, olive groves and vineyards burned.

One of the causes is climate change. One appeared in the journal “Nature Climate Change” earlier this week Studywhich demonstrates its increasing influence on fires in forests and savannahs, even if the respective triggers are diverse. Sometimes it’s arson, sometimes it’s the carelessness of discarded cigarette butts. Damaged electrical cables can be the cause, as can agricultural machines that give off sparks in dry fields.

The triggers are not new, but they occur in drier conditions in which the fire can spread better and more quickly. “Our study shows that as soon as fires occur, the influence of climate change becomes increasingly significant with drier and warmer weather conditions,” explains Chantelle Burton, who researches at the British Met Office Hadley Center and is one of the lead authors of the study. For the work, which also involved employees of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, global models for the interaction between fire, water balance and vegetation were calculated. A comparison with a scenario without climate change showed that the area burned worldwide increased by 15.8 percent from 2003 to 2019.

Building on this, another one published in the same place Study examines what effects the forest fires have on health. After all, they produce and stir up huge amounts of soot and ash, which can be dangerous to people as particulate matter. The research showed that fire-related deaths from air pollution increased from 46,401 per year in the 1960s to 98,748 in the 2010s. Of these, 669 per year in the 1960s and more than 12,500 per year in the past decade could be attributed to climate change. “Our research shows that climate change is increasingly posing a threat to public health as smoke hits densely populated areas more frequently,” says lead author Chae Yeon Park, from the Japan National Institute of Industrial and Scientific Technology.

In Kuala Lumpur or Singapore on the Malaysian peninsula, people have long been able to sing a song about the thick air. People there repeatedly suffer from the smoke from fires set by plantation owners on the neighboring Indonesian island of Sumatra. However, conditions in Sumatra are still relatively humid, so larger forest fires only occur when people help.

In many other regions, however, extreme drought as a result of climate change is encouraging the spread of fire. A third study, which appeared last week in the journal “Science,” shows that these regions are mostly – unlike Sumatra – outside the tropics. Their result: In temperate latitudes, fine dust pollution from fires has increased exponentially, for which climate change is responsible. In the tropics, however, as in Sumatra, humans are primarily responsible for the extent of the fires. The authors expressly warn that increasing fire activity in temperate latitudes calls into question the storage function of forests. These still remove the greenhouse gas CO from the atmosphere₂. However, it is released again in fires, and extreme drought can also make the forest more likely to emit CO₂-Source will. The federal forest inventory recently showed the latter for the local forests.

»Climate change is increasingly posing a threat to public health.«

Chae Yeon Park Climate scientist

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