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El Niño and health risks from landscape fire emissions in southeast Asia

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 131–136 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Emissions from landscape fires affect both climate and air quality1. Here, we combine satellite-derived fire estimates and atmospheric modelling to quantify health effects from fire emissions in southeast Asia from 1997 to 2006. This region has large interannual variability in fire activity owing to coupling between El Niño-induced droughts and anthropogenic land-use change2,3. We show that during strong El Niño years, fires contribute up to 200 μg m−3 and 50 ppb in annual average fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone surface concentrations near fire sources, respectively. This corresponds to a fire contribution of 200 additional days per year that exceed the World Health Organization 50 μg m−3 24-hr PM2.5 interim target4 and an estimated 10,800 (6,800–14,300)-person (∼ 2%) annual increase in regional adult cardiovascular mortality. Our results indicate that reducing regional deforestation and degradation fires would improve public health along with widely established benefits from reducing carbon emissions, preserving biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services.

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Figure 1: Study area population and locations of fire activity.
Figure 2: Modelled annual mean surface concentrations and corresponding additional daily exceedances in 1997 owing to fires only.
Figure 3: Population exposure above WHO interim targets.
Figure 4: Estimated additional annual cardiovascular disease mortality from exposure to fire-contributed annual PM2.5 and 24-hr O3, along with the multivariate El Niño index16.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to P. Kasibhatla for his help with the GEOS-Chem model runs. We also thank the local staff at B. K. Tabang and T. Rata for the WDCGG O3 data, M. Brauer for the annual PM2.5 data and K. Wolter at NOAA for the El Niño index. This work was supported by a National Sciences Foundation graduate research fellowship and NASA award NNX11AF96G. GFED3 is publicly available at http://www.globalfiredata.org.

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Author notes

  1. Apostolos Voulgarakis

    Present address: Present address: Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964, USA

    Miriam E. Marlier

  2. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

    Ruth S. DeFries

  3. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York, New York 10025, USA

    Apostolos Voulgarakis, Drew T. Shindell & Greg Faluvegi

  4. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA

    Patrick L. Kinney

  5. Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    James T. Randerson & Yang Chen

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Contributions

R.S.D., A.V. and M.E.M. designed the study. G.F., A.V. and M.E.M. conducted the model runs; R.S.D., A.V., J.T.R., D.T.S., Y.C. and M.E.M. contributed to the model analysis; P.L.K. and M.E.M. conducted the health estimates. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Miriam E. Marlier or Apostolos Voulgarakis.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Marlier, M., DeFries, R., Voulgarakis, A. et al. El Niño and health risks from landscape fire emissions in southeast Asia. Nature Clim Change 3, 131–136 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1658

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