Estimated Impacts of Prescribed Fires on Air Quality and Premature Deaths in Georgia and Surrounding Areas in the US, 2015–2020

Abstract

Smoke from wildfires poses a substantial threat to health in communities near and far. To mitigate the extent and potential damage of wildfires, prescribed burning techniques are commonly employed as land management tools; however, they introduce their own smoke-related risks. This study investigates the impact of prescribed fires on daily average PM 2.5 and maximum daily 8-h averaged O 3 (MDA8-O 3 ) concentrations and estimates premature deaths associated with short-term exposure to prescribed fire PM 2.5 and MDA8-O 3 in Georgia and surrounding areas of the Southeastern US from 2015 to 2020. Our findings indicate that over the study domain, prescribed fire contributes to average daily PM 2.5 by 0.94 ± 1.45 μg/m 3 (mean ± standard deviation), accounting for 14.0% of year-round ambient PM 2.5 . Higher average daily contributions were predicted during the extensive burning season (January−April): 1.43 ± 1.97 μg/m 3 (20.0% of ambient PM 2.5 ). Additionally, prescribed burning is also responsible for an annual average increase of 0.36 ± 0.61 ppb in MDA8-O 3 (approximately 0.8% of ambient MDA8-O 3 ) and 1.3% (0.62 ± 0.88 ppb) during the extensive burning season. We estimate that short-term exposure to prescribed fire PM 2.5 and MDA8-O 3 could have caused 2665 (95% confidence interval (CI): 2249−3080) and 233 (95% CI: 148−317) excess deaths, respectively. These results suggest that smoke from prescribed burns increases the mortality. However, refraining from such burns may escalate the risk of wildfires; therefore, the trade-offs between the health impacts of wildfires and prescribed fires, including morbidity, need to be taken into consideration in future studies.