Health impacts of landscape fire and wood heater smoke in Tasmnia, a health impact assessment 2020

Nicolas Borchers is supported through a PhD scholarship from AA.

Research based in Tasmania, given the high rate of wood fire heater use during winter which produced fine particulate matter, harmful to human health and particularly people with asthma or other chronic conditions. The researched aimed to estimate the historical health impacts and health costs from PM2.5 produced by wood heater smoke and landscape fire smoke (includes wildfires and hazard reduction burning)
Method
– Modelling study
– health impact assessment to estimate the number of cases and costs due to premature mortality, cardiorespiratory hospital admissions, asthma ED visits
– analysed historical air pollution, temperature and assessed where PM2.5 was due to landscape fire or wood fire heaters
– between January 2010 and December 2019
– characterise days an unpolluted or polluted, and if polluted determine whether they were primarily woodfire heater and landscape fire smoke
Results
– estimated 69 deaths, 86 hospital admissions and 15 asthma ED visits each year, with 74% of impacts attributable to wood fire heaters
– estimated yearly average health costs were $293 million for wood fire heaters, and $16 million for landscape fire smoke
– during extreme bushfire seasons, landscape fire smoke cost more than $34 million per year
– unlike wood fire heaters, landscape fire impacts are not distributed evenly from year to year, but vary according to the intensity of the bushfire season. If you exclude 2016 and 2019 from the analysis, the yearly cases drops substantially for landscape fire smoke