Climate change may be contributing to thousands more wildfire smoke-related deaths every year than in previous decades, a new study suggests — results a Canadian co-author says underline the urgency of reducing planet-warming emissions.
The international study published Monday is one of the most rigorous yet in determining just how much climate change can be linked to wildfire smoke deaths around the world, said Sian Kou-Giesbrecht, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
Translated to a proportion of wildfire smoke mortality overall, the study estimates about 13 per cent of estimated excess deaths in the 2010s were linked to climate change, compared to about 1.2 per cent in the 1960s. The same research group is behind another study published in the same journal Monday that suggests climate change increased the global area burned by wildfire by about 16 per cent from 2003 to 2019.
Researchers used established public-health metrics for when pollution is thought to contribute to mortality, then figured out the extent to which wildfire smoke may have played a role in that overall exposure to arrive at the estimates. She suggested that's likely due to the country's relatively small population size, and how tricky it is to model forest fires in the region, given its unique mix of shrubs and peat.
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