Stony Brook University-led study finds wildfire smoke could lead to tens of thousands of deaths

A new study led by a Stony Brook University researcher projects that, due to climate change factors, there will be more wildfires in the coming decades, and their smoke could lead to tens of thousands of deaths by 2050.

And the impact could be felt locally.

While wildfires themselves are not a major issue in New York, the researchers said smoke from fires in Canada and the western United States have caused problems here. In 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires turned the skies over the tri-state region orange.

"Because of climate change, we project more wildfires in Canada and western U.S. and their smoke transport to New York," Minghao Qiu, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature, said in an interview with Newsday. Qiu is an assistant professor at Stony Brook's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and a core faculty member of the university's Program in Public Health.

Marshall Burke, senior study author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University's Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a separate interview: "I think big picture, people are increasingly aware wildfire is a problem."

Their study, he said, tried to determine, "Is this an anomaly or should we expect more of this in the future?"

Burke added, "Lots of research has shown that a warming climate helps to drive increases in wildfire activity. ... What we wanted to understand was, are those trends going to continue? And what does that mean for smoke exposure in New York or California?"

'Unique' study model

Qiu said the research, conducted by a national team of investigators, involved intricate analysis that included satellite data pinpointing the locations of wildfires and the study of historical mortality data. He said researchers observed "that the death rate of multiple causes increase substantially during wildfire smoke when compared to the same location when there’s no wildfire smoke."

Qiu said linking smoke pollution to mortality is "an important stage and distinguishes our studies from some earlier studies."

He explained that while research has long shown that air pollution — through the effects of PM2.5, which are small particles that can get deep into lungs — is a health hazard, "The new hypothesis is the pollution from wildfire smoke may be different from pollution from other sources, like power plants and cars. The reason is that even though we are talking about the same air pollutant, PM2.5 ... wildfire smoke may have a different chemical composition."

Dr. Kenneth Spaeth, Northwell Health's chief of occupational and environmental medicine, said while the connection between elevated levels of PM2.5 and higher mortality was already established, the study's model was "unique."

"What they’re doing is building a model that is intended to predict PM2.5 specifically from wildfires as they occur in the next 20 years or so," said Spaeth, who was not involved in the study.

He added, "They constructed an original model that would predict the increasing and severity of wildfires around the U.S. and [are] using that as a spring board to predict how that would impact mortality rates."

Spaeth said of the researchers: "They’re utilizing well-established studies and well-established science on the consequences of exposure to PM2.5 on mortality rates. There’s good data to make predictions off of that."

Whether the model is accurate, he said, is "a little bit harder to know … there’s some amount of uncertainty, but the basic parameters they use seem sound in my view."

Spaeth said the predictions in the researchers' model "don’t have major implications for the Long Island region. There are certainly increases in PM2.5 here. They're not as dramatic or widespread as in other parts of the country, but they’re still significant."

And as the researchers noted, Spaeth said the effect of wildfires in Canada, the Northwest or California "do make their way here. Even if our region is not necessarily a high-risk wildfire region, we can still suffer the consequences."

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie