Climate Change and Health Seminar: “Links between Wildfires, Air Pollution, and Health under a Changing Climate”
May 06, 2021Information
Dr. Michelle Bell, Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health at the Yale University School of the Environment
April 19, 2021
ID6570
To CiteDCA Citation Guide
- 00:01<v ->Okay, welcome everyone to</v>
- 00:04the Yale Center of Climate Change and Health seminar series.
- 00:08I'm Dr Kai Chen, assistant professor
- 00:10at the Yale School of Public Health
- 00:12and also the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health.
- 00:15So this is my great pleasure today to introduce
- 00:18our today's speaker Professor Michelle Bell.
- 00:21Professor Bell is the Mary E Pinchot Health Professor
- 00:26of Environmental Health at the Yale School of Environment.
- 00:30She's a recipient of many awards,
- 00:34including the Rosenblith New Investigator Award
- 00:38from the Health Effect Institute,
- 00:40the NIH Outstanding New Environmental Scientists Award
- 00:44the ONES award.
- 00:46Last year she was selected
- 00:48to the National Academy of Medicine.
- 00:51And I think there's no better coating
- 00:54for introduce her work from the National Academy
- 00:58of Medicine for her global latest
- 01:02in environmental health addressing critical topics
- 01:05such as air pollution and climate change,
- 01:08and introducing large-scale models that have
- 01:12advanced environment research
- 01:14at both global and local levels.
- 01:17So without further ado, I would turn the mich to Michelle.
- 01:23<v ->Great, thank you for that kind introduction Kai.</v>
- 01:26I'm gonna share my screen
- 01:28and if someone could give me a thumbs up to let me know
- 01:32if it works in presentation mode.
- 01:37Went to the bottom of the presentation for some reason.
- 01:39Is it working?
- 01:40<v ->Yes, it works.</v>
- 01:41<v ->Okay, great, thank you.</v>
- 01:43So thank you so much for spending some of your day
- 01:45with me here to let me share my work.
- 01:47I'm very excited to share this research with you.
- 01:50And I want to thank Professor Chan
- 01:52and Professor Dubrow for this invitation.
- 01:55I also wanna let you know I'm suffering
- 01:56from major COVID vaccine side effects.
- 01:58So, just be kind with me today (laughing),
- 02:02but I'm very happy to be here.
- 02:03So I'm gonna talk about some work we've done on wildfires,
- 02:07air pollution and health with a special emphasis on climate
- 02:10given the the sponsor of this seminar.
- 02:13And this is an outline of the talk
- 02:14I've prepared for you today.
- 02:15I'm gonna give some general background on wildfires,
- 02:18air pollution and climate.
- 02:20I wanna share with you some research studies
- 02:22that we have conducted looking at how air pollutions,
- 02:25or smoke from wildfires can impact human health,
- 02:28and some of the work we've done
- 02:30in the context of climate change as well.
- 02:32I wanna briefly share
- 02:33with you some ongoing and planned research
- 02:36and then I'll have a few concluding thoughts.
- 02:37So let me start with some background.
- 02:40So this is a slide that I've had for many years.
- 02:43Some of my students may recognize this
- 02:44and I update it every year just to show the number
- 02:48of peer reviewed journal articles
- 02:50on climate change in health.
- 02:52And you can see this just incredible growth.
- 02:55This is updated through 2020,
- 02:57where we have this incredibly strong scientific interest
- 03:01in climate change in health.
- 03:02And I would argue a public interest
- 03:04and perhaps, political interest as well.
- 03:07If we look at the major laws and regulations worldwide
- 03:11for the environment, not all of them
- 03:13but most of them relate to human health.
- 03:15And human health has been missing
- 03:17from much of the climate change debate.
- 03:19And so I think that this is actually
- 03:22really critically important in that
- 03:25this Yale Center that Kai and Rob run is really critical
- 03:29to advancing that effort.
- 03:31This is a figure, it's a bit complicated.
- 03:33I'm gonna walk you through parts of it
- 03:35but this is from a recent review article that we published.
- 03:39I'm gonna talk more about this article in a minute
- 03:41but we talk about the links
- 03:42between climate change, wildfire smoke and health.
- 03:45And my point for this figure is just to show
- 03:48that there are so many different pathways
- 03:50through which climate change could impact wildfires.
- 03:52It's not just that there's an overall warming.
- 03:55And so are you able to see my cursor maybe?
- 03:59Well, if you look in the upper right-hand side
- 04:02under climate change, you'll see there's high temperatures
- 04:05possibly lightening making a role,
- 04:07changes in precipitation,
- 04:09changes in wind patterns and so on.
- 04:11And then you see greenhouse gas emissions is combustion
- 04:14of fossil fuels leading down to impacts on human health.
- 04:17So my key point here being that there are a lot
- 04:20of really complex pathways through which climate change
- 04:23could impact wildfires, could impact human health.
- 04:26And this is from an article that not one of my articles,
- 04:29another researcher's article showing an increased
- 04:32in forest fires in the Western United States.
- 04:34And I wanna draw your attention
- 04:36to that lower figure with the red dots.
- 04:39And that's showing from 1984 to 2017
- 04:42this enormous change in wildfires, this is area burn.
- 04:47So this is not the smoke.
- 04:48This is the fire.
- 04:50I also wanna point out these kind of cyclical up and down,
- 04:55how we have this variation that goes up
- 04:57but in this zigzag pattern.
- 04:59This makes it very easy for someone either innocently
- 05:01or intentionally to downgrade or downplay
- 05:06the role that climate change has on wildfires.
- 05:10If they just pick off two or three points from this
- 05:13and there it looks like it's going down or not increasing.
- 05:18And I thought it might be useful today to take a step back
- 05:22to what I was thinking when I first started looking
- 05:24at wildfires and human health several years ago.
- 05:27And so I just was interested in this topic
- 05:29and started reading some publications
- 05:32from the United States government.
- 05:34And I just wanna point out two of them.
- 05:36One is from the US Forest Service, which noted
- 05:39that forest fire smoke was hazardous to human health.
- 05:41Even though there really has not been very many studies
- 05:44at the time, but they felt the US FS felt that
- 05:47given the overwhelming strong evidence
- 05:50that particulate matter from other sources
- 05:51is harmful to human health, we really should think
- 05:54that wildfire smoke is harmful to human health as well.
- 05:57And then I saw lots and lots of economic damages
- 06:00associated from wildfires.
- 06:01And I'm just pulling out one example here.
- 06:04So this is from NOAA, a US government agency
- 06:08and they estimated almost $7 billion in property damage
- 06:11and $58 million in crop damage
- 06:14over that period of about a decade.
- 06:17What's really interesting to me
- 06:19was part of why I got studied in this research
- 06:21is none of the estimates I found at that time
- 06:24considered human health.
- 06:25It's like nobody coughed, right?
- 06:27So my argument is that the damages from wildfires
- 06:31are grossly underestimated because they're not incorporating
- 06:35this change in human health.
- 06:36And that we had compelling evidence
- 06:38that wildfire smoke harms human health,
- 06:40but there's really a lot of uncertainty.
- 06:44And just wanna give a little more background
- 06:46about particulate matter.
- 06:47So particularly matter is
- 06:48the primary air pollutant we're concerned about.
- 06:51I just wanna give some background.
- 06:52I think many people on this seminar will know
- 06:55a lot about particulate matter,
- 06:56but in case you're not familiar maybe you work in water
- 06:59or some other field, it's really just exactly
- 07:01what it sounds like.
- 07:02It's particles in the air that can be made up
- 07:04of different chemical composition,
- 07:06they can have different sizes and different shapes.
- 07:09And then really the size matters a lot.
- 07:13So this is a schematic from EPA
- 07:16showing the width of a human hair
- 07:18and then showing how small these particles can be.
- 07:21I wanna draw your attention
- 07:22to what's (indistinct) the pink particles.
- 07:24Of course, they're not pink
- 07:25but in this figure of the pink particles
- 07:27showing that the PM 2.5 particles
- 07:30from combustion are very, very small.
- 07:32They penetrate deeper into the respiratory system
- 07:35than do larger particles.
- 07:36And this is what we're having
- 07:37from combustion from wildfires.
- 07:42Okay, I wanna go back to this review article
- 07:44that we published recently in
- 07:45the "New England Journal of Medicine,"
- 07:47and throughout the talk, I'm gonna highlight
- 07:49some of the researchers and collaborators.
- 07:50And so this photo is Rongbin Xu,
- 07:52who was the lead author on this paper.
- 07:55And so this is an article that's a review article
- 07:59that gives some kind of synthesis of what do we know
- 08:02about wildfires, global climate change and human health.
- 08:05I have a slide on some of our references
- 08:07at the end of this, if you're interested.
- 08:08So if you wanna know more about this topic
- 08:10and wanna read one article or small number of articles
- 08:14this might be one you wanna check out.
- 08:16And I wanna highlight that we went through
- 08:18and looked at the characteristics
- 08:20and health risks of wildfires.
- 08:21Like what's the state of the science.
- 08:23So let me blow up part of our table.
- 08:25So for mortality, we concluded
- 08:27there was consistent evidence.
- 08:29Those of you who have taken my class know that I
- 08:32and other people in public health are very cautious
- 08:35about using words like cause or proven or things like that.
- 08:39So we use a lot of this couched language,
- 08:41consistent evidence but that should by no means
- 08:45be considered that we don't have very strong evidence.
- 08:48It's just scientists being really careful.
- 08:51So we have consistent evidence that there's an increase
- 08:53in mortality from wildfire smoke
- 08:55and a real critical question is,
- 08:58are the particles from wildfire more
- 09:01or less harmful than particles from other sources?
- 09:04This is a broader question where we could look at particles
- 09:06from vehicles versus particles from coal combustion
- 09:08versus all combustion versus agriculture
- 09:11and now versus wildfires.
- 09:13And the evidence on this it's not perfectly consistent.
- 09:16So we said that for mortality
- 09:17wildfire particles may have a stronger effect.
- 09:20Now why would different sources
- 09:22of particles have different impacts?
- 09:24Well, as I mentioned, the particles have different sizes
- 09:26but they also have different chemical compositions.
- 09:28So if you have a particle
- 09:30that's coming a lot from oil combustion
- 09:32it's gonna have a lot of niclin vanadium.
- 09:34If it's coming from coal combustion,
- 09:35it's gonna have a lot of ammonium sulfate and so on.
- 09:37So different particles have different chemical structures.
- 09:40And we know these chemical structures matter
- 09:42for human health impacts.
- 09:44Although none of the particles are good for you.
- 09:46So this is why this is a critical question.
- 09:49We concluded consistent evidence of respiratory impacts
- 09:53maybe a stronger effect on asthma related events.
- 09:57So the basic summary of this table
- 09:59and my wording would be that we have very strong evidence
- 10:02that there is something happening
- 10:04for wildfire smoke harming human health,
- 10:06but there are a lot of unanswered questions
- 10:08that we could continue to investigate as well.
- 10:11So for example, the long-term health effects
- 10:13I've highlighted here we said they were largely unknown.
- 10:17So let me move to the second part of this talk
- 10:20where I really wanna highlight some of the research studies
- 10:22that my team has done looking at wildfire smoke.
- 10:26I wanna highlight my two key collaborators
- 10:28for this project.
- 10:29They're both at Harvard University, Francesca Dominici
- 10:32who's a biostatistician and Loretta Mickley
- 10:34who is a wildfire modeler amongst other things,
- 10:37amongst other types of air quality modeling.
- 10:40So I know there's a lot in this slide
- 10:41but let me just through some key features.
- 10:43So the first upper left,
- 10:46we started with forest fire emissions.
- 10:48And by we, this is Loretta Mickley
- 10:50who's an expert in this, and we have information
- 10:52on forest fires, on anthropogenic emissions,
- 10:55meteorological data we're using the GEOS-Chem model.
- 10:57And then as you move to the right,
- 10:59I don't know if you can see my cursor
- 11:00but these two orange blocks in the upper right.
- 11:02We have daily estimates of PM 2.5
- 11:05from all sources and from wildfire and from non fires.
- 11:10And then we can estimate the PM 2.5
- 11:12from wildfires specifically,
- 11:15This is an enormous advancement over
- 11:17some of the previous studies that look at satellite imagery
- 11:19and so on to really look at,
- 11:22does there appear to be a wildfire here, yes, no.
- 11:25Here we're actually estimating
- 11:27the actual level of wildfire pollution.
- 11:30And we're able to distinguish between particles
- 11:32from wildfires and particles that aren't.
- 11:35In the second aim, we're linking these estimates
- 11:37to Medicare data for the United States
- 11:42or for urban areas in the United States,
- 11:44trying to see if these wildfire smoke is associated
- 11:47with increase in hospitalizations
- 11:49and I'll show you some results later.
- 11:51And then in the third aim, we wanna look
- 11:53at what wildfires might look like under a changing climate.
- 11:58So in my talks, I like to give you a little peek
- 12:01behind the curtain of what's happening in the research.
- 12:03So this is what I'm gonna do right now.
- 12:06Sometimes I just don't like when I do this,
- 12:08you're giving away our secrets, but let me tell you
- 12:10some things that happened for wildfire smoke.
- 12:12So when I first started working on wildfires,
- 12:15the wildfire modelers, including Loretta Mickley
- 12:17and others kept talking about the validation of their model.
- 12:21This is what they were talking about is area burned, right?
- 12:24The models did very, very well for area burned,
- 12:26but I wasn't interesting area burned.
- 12:28I'm interested in this.
- 12:30So this is something really important for climate change
- 12:33human health research more broadly.
- 12:34And while we need interdisciplinary research,
- 12:37it's not good enough to just say my model was validated,
- 12:40validated for what?
- 12:42Validated to accurately estimate area burned,
- 12:45doesn't mean you're getting accurate estimates of smoke
- 12:49thousands of kilometers away.
- 12:51Alright, Loretta Mickley who's my favorite wildfire modler,
- 12:55one of my favorites.
- 12:55She got this very, very quickly.
- 12:57And so she went and did some validation
- 12:59of the wildfire smoke and we found
- 13:01that the models work well for that too.
- 13:05Next, I wanna highlight some of the research we've done
- 13:08looking at wildfire PM 2.5.
- 13:10So these are small particles fine particles in health.
- 13:13In the photo there is a one of
- 13:15the lead researchers for this work.
- 13:16She's a former PhD student Coco Liu.
- 13:20And so in this research, we had several challenges
- 13:23and I wanna highlight two of the key challenges
- 13:25to give you again a little peek behind the curtain.
- 13:28The first one is we really were interested
- 13:30in estimating wildfire smoke, the PM 2.5 from wildfires
- 13:35not just PM 2.5 during a wildfire.
- 13:37And we use that with our wildfire modeling and GEOS-Chem.
- 13:42The second challenge is one that we didn't really
- 13:44anticipate is that the day-to-day structure
- 13:48of how wildfire smoke varies in concentration
- 13:52is very different from other pollutants.
- 13:54So you can think of ozone is kind of low,
- 13:56it's high in summer, and it comes back down
- 13:58or it has a diurnal pattern
- 14:00and particles kind of do like this.
- 14:02Wildfires it's radically different.
- 14:04It's nothing, nothing, nothing crazy, crazy high,
- 14:06nothing nothing, nothing.
- 14:08So the traditional air pollution by statistical models
- 14:12to look at air pollution didn't function as well.
- 14:16So what we did and actually Coco
- 14:19came up with this new concept called a smoke weight.
- 14:21It's really analogous to a heat wave.
- 14:23So it's a series of contiguous days that have a high level
- 14:28of PM 2.5 specifically from wildfires.
- 14:32And we use this to characterize wildfire pollution episodes
- 14:36and compare the risk of different health events
- 14:37during that episode to non wildfire episodes
- 14:41that were not right up against that wildfire episode.
- 14:44So we used a variety of different definitions
- 14:48to categorize the smoke wave.
- 14:49I'm gonna show you some results,
- 14:50but you could really think of it too similar to a heat wave
- 14:53where you might have a heat wave defined
- 14:55as two or more consecutive days with temperature
- 14:58over the 95th percentile, or you could have three
- 15:00or more consecutive days,
- 15:01or you could use the 96 percentile and so on.
- 15:06So here's some of our results
- 15:08were published a few years ago.
- 15:10For this particular result I'm showing you
- 15:12it's a smoke web definition of two or more days
- 15:14with wildfire specific PM 2.5 greater than 37.
- 15:17That should be microgram per cubic meter.
- 15:19That's a typo, I'll fix it later, my apologies.
- 15:23And so what we've found or Coco's paper is that there was
- 15:27over 7% increase in respiratory hospital admissions
- 15:31for people 65 and older in the United States.
- 15:33Let's just the Western United States
- 15:35during smoke waves compared to non-smoker wave events.
- 15:39I wanna highlight another point here
- 15:40about epidemiological public health research.
- 15:43Sometimes when I'm talking to decision makers
- 15:45and people in Congress and so on,
- 15:477% might seem like a big number to them
- 15:49or it might seem like a small number to them.
- 15:52And my students know that I caution us
- 15:54against using words like only 72.2% or trying
- 15:59to make the number sounded bigger, sound small.
- 16:01I prefer to let the numbers speak for themselves.
- 16:03I do wanna point out that this number,
- 16:06the 7.2% increase is on everybody exposed to the event.
- 16:11So a 7% increase that only affected 100 people
- 16:15might have one public health burden,
- 16:16but a 7% increase that affects huge swaths
- 16:20of population in the Western United States
- 16:23is in much much larger public health burden.
- 16:27And next I wanna share with you some results
- 16:29where we looked at different types of smoke waves
- 16:32looking at intensity and also timing.
- 16:37So let's just look at the left-hand side.
- 16:39So this is again, the percent increase
- 16:42of respiratory hospitalizations in this case,
- 16:45looking at smoke wave intensity.
- 16:46And what you find here is that with as you move
- 16:49to the right-hand side of that left panel,
- 16:51the effect estimates go up.
- 16:52What this means is is that when smoke waves are more intense
- 16:56by which I mean a wildfire with higher levels of pollution,
- 16:59the risk goes up and you see a very clear trend.
- 17:01And that makes a lot of sense.
- 17:04On the right-hand side,
- 17:05I'm looking at the days within the smoke wave.
- 17:08Again, this is really kind of analogous to a heat wave.
- 17:11So the first and second day is not where we see
- 17:13the largest health impact.
- 17:15It was really on a week,
- 17:18but really the third to seventh day of the week.
- 17:20And then the effect went down later.
- 17:21So there's really some interesting things that we need
- 17:24to start thinking about for when in a smoke wave
- 17:27to the highest health impacts for respiratory causes occur.
- 17:30You can imagine this would be really critically important
- 17:32if you were trying to do some type
- 17:34of public health intervention.
- 17:39Now, let's take these estimates of wildfire smoke
- 17:43and start thinking about them
- 17:44in the context of climate change.
- 17:45And here again, I wanna give you another
- 17:48little peek behind the curtain.
- 17:49So we generated this map at the County level
- 17:52showing changes in different smoke
- 17:54with characteristics under climate change.
- 17:56This is what I call a middle
- 17:58of the road climate change policy.
- 18:00So it's not everybody goes crazy
- 18:02lowering greenhouse gas emissions
- 18:04and it's not everybody goes crazy
- 18:06raising greenhouse gas emissions.
- 18:07It's a middle of the road scenario.
- 18:09And we're looking at the change in the number
- 18:12of smoke waves from 2046 2051 representing the future.
- 18:16And this is really only for the fire season,
- 18:18to 2004 to 2009 representing the current day.
- 18:22And everything I'm showing you today
- 18:24is using state-of-the-art models.
- 18:25There's no reduced four models here.
- 18:28And what I want to just know before he went to the details
- 18:31of this map is that we generated
- 18:34an online version of this map,
- 18:35where you can click on your County or County of interests
- 18:39and look at different features.
- 18:40Look at the demographics of that County,
- 18:42look at the anticipated future demographics of the County,
- 18:45look at different features of a smoke wave and so on.
- 18:47And we spend a lot of time developing this map.
- 18:50And then we just hired a Yale undergraduate
- 18:52who did it in like a weekend, super quick.
- 18:56And then I asked him,
- 18:58can I hire you to do some more work?
- 19:00And he was like, no, I'm going to work at Google.
- 19:02So we lost our great map builder.
- 19:05But I think that my point I'm trying to make here
- 19:08is that this type of interactive map
- 19:10or some way are really helping get the results
- 19:14to a digestible usable format for decision makers
- 19:18in the general public is really critically important.
- 19:21And in some cases, it's very difficult.
- 19:23And in some cases there might be some easier solutions
- 19:27than we had thought of.
- 19:28Like in my case, hiring a undergrad computer genius
- 19:31to do it so that we didn't do it.
- 19:34So we have this map and we're looking at the difference
- 19:36in the number of smoke waves.
- 19:37And in green that shows that those counties
- 19:39will have fewer smoke waves in the future than they do now.
- 19:43And then going up to red where they
- 19:44have many, many more smoke waves.
- 19:46And we're gonna look at some other maps as well.
- 19:49And I want you to look at whatever section
- 19:51is of interest to you, but perhaps draw your attention
- 19:54to Northern California.
- 19:55So we see there that there's really
- 19:58either goes down for the number of smoke waves
- 20:00or perhaps it goes up a little bit,
- 20:01we don't have a whole lot in Northern California.
- 20:04I'm just using this as an example.
- 20:05In Northern California
- 20:06where we go to this really high level,
- 20:09but maybe those smoke waves last longer.
- 20:11So this is looking at the difference
- 20:12in the length of smoke ways where the previous one
- 20:14looked at the number of smoke waves.
- 20:16And here we see a different picture
- 20:19where we see again in Northern California,
- 20:21the smoke waves are not lasting as long.
- 20:23They're gonna be shorter, but for many
- 20:25many parts of the Western United States, in Colorado,
- 20:28Washington, Montana, Idaho and central California,
- 20:31the smoke waves are anticipated to last longer.
- 20:35And then finally looking at the intensity.
- 20:37So this is how much pollution is
- 20:39being generated by all these wildfires.
- 20:43And here, if we'd been looking at Northern California,
- 20:45we see that there really is a dramatic increase
- 20:48with Northern California having much more pollution
- 20:51from wildfires than they did previously.
- 20:54So another reason I wanted to show these maps is to show
- 20:57that these different characteristics of smoke waves
- 21:00or air pollution from wildfires, what metric you use
- 21:04in environmental health research more broadly
- 21:06can really dictate what the impression is to policymakers.
- 21:12And again, the false impression could happen innocently
- 21:14or it can happen on purpose
- 21:16but you could imagine someone looking at this map
- 21:19and just saying, smoke waves are gonna last
- 21:21a shorter period of time in Northern California.
- 21:23So perhaps doesn't look like a big problem
- 21:25but really things are much more complex.
- 21:27And overall, our results found that under climate change
- 21:30we anticipate the wildfires to occur more often,
- 21:34we anticipate them to last longer
- 21:36and we anticipate them to burn hotter.
- 21:40I wanna raise the issue of environmental justice
- 21:43which I'm using in the framework that environmental justice
- 21:46is the concept and the reality
- 21:49that certain subpopulations suffer
- 21:51a disproportionate public health burden
- 21:53from environmental conditions.
- 21:55And I wanna talk about this
- 21:56in the context of wildfires under a changing climate.
- 22:00And again, Loretta Mickley was our wildcard modeler
- 22:02on this project you see there.
- 22:04And then the other photo is Lucio Woo
- 22:06who's a former master student.
- 22:07She's graduated master's student
- 22:09from the Yale School of the Environment.
- 22:10And this was part of her master's research project.
- 22:13She did an amazing job.
- 22:15And so Lucio was interested in estimating
- 22:18what wildfire smoke looked like in Alaska.
- 22:21And so just to show you what that looked like,
- 22:25there's a map showing that we see an increase
- 22:28in smoke from PM 2.5 from wildfires
- 22:31by the 2050s compared to the present day.
- 22:34But we also see a very distinct geographical pattern
- 22:37where some parts of Alaska see a very small increase
- 22:40and some parts see a larger increase.
- 22:43Well, Lucio was also interested in thinking about
- 22:47which populations we're going to experience this increase.
- 22:51And she presented her work at a conference and meeting
- 22:54that involved many native American tribes in Alaska.
- 22:57And they gave her guidance on how to define
- 23:00the native American tribes for her research.
- 23:02So we followed their guidance, their self definitions
- 23:07of how they wanted this work done.
- 23:10And one of the things that Lucio notice is
- 23:12that the Alaskan Athabaskan tribe was really concentrated
- 23:16in certain parts of Alaska.
- 23:18And you see there that six to 13%.
- 23:21And here what we're plotting here
- 23:23are different native American tribes.
- 23:25Each tribe is a different color showing you the change
- 23:29or the smoke PM 2.5 exposure going
- 23:33from May to September,
- 23:35and is a function of where the tribes are located
- 23:38and where we anticipate wildfire smoke.
- 23:41You can see that this one tribe is really
- 23:43suffering a disproportionate burden
- 23:45of this anticipated increase in wildfire smoke
- 23:48under a changing climate.
- 23:50So large areas of Alaska would be anticipated
- 23:53to experience a double or tripling
- 23:55of monthly smoke exposure.
- 23:57So this is air pollution from wildfires by the 2050s,
- 24:01but there are very strong implications
- 24:02for indigenous people where these effects
- 24:04will not be experienced uniformly
- 24:07even across indigenous people in Alaska.
- 24:12All right, next I wanna share
- 24:13with you some ongoing and planned research
- 24:16that we have for the future related
- 24:18to wildfires and human health and climate change.
- 24:21And I put this figure here just 'cause I think it's neat.
- 24:24So anyone guess where my project is gonna be?
- 24:27You all know it's Australia (chuckles).
- 24:31So let me just start with these two projects
- 24:33that we have one ongoing and one's about to get started.
- 24:36So on the left, there's a project led by Yuming Guo.
- 24:39His photo is the far left of that photo
- 24:41right at the bottom, his photo is kind of in the middle.
- 24:44And Yuming is leading a project with many researchers
- 24:47around the world, including me and many, many others,
- 24:50but we're looking at wildfires and air pollution
- 24:52in relation to a variety of human health end points.
- 24:55And this was sponsored by the Australian Research Council.
- 24:58So some of the advantages of this project
- 24:59is we're really trying to go global
- 25:02and look at wildfires in different parts of the world.
- 25:05And then the second project which is planned
- 25:07and we hope to start out into this summer
- 25:10is looking at bushfires
- 25:11which is the Australian term for wildfires,
- 25:13and air pollution and risk of birth outcomes in Australia.
- 25:16And then I've listed the names there
- 25:18of the different collaborators, including Josh Warren
- 25:22who's a biostatistician here at Yale,
- 25:24and then several collaborators from Australia
- 25:28from multiple three different universities in Australia.
- 25:31And Yuming is in the middle there
- 25:32because he's in both projects.
- 25:34And so for this project, as you all know,
- 25:37Australia experienced devastating wildfires in recent years.
- 25:42And for this project, what we're really interested
- 25:44in looking at is how mothers exposure to air pollution
- 25:47from wildfires during pregnancy
- 25:49impacts risks of adverse birth outcomes,
- 25:51looking at things like low birth weight, preterm birth
- 25:54and a variety of other adverse birth outcomes.
- 25:58And we will be able in this project,
- 26:00we plan I should say, we plan to also look at differences
- 26:03for the indigenous population as compared
- 26:06to the general population overall,
- 26:08and also to look at differences by socioeconomic position
- 26:12and other types of factors that could be effect modifiers
- 26:15and mean that some subpopulations might respond differently.
- 26:19So I wanna highlight here again, the earlier work I showed
- 26:22from Alaska with Lucio Woo was looking
- 26:24at environmental justice with relation to exposure.
- 26:27In this work, we're also looking at environmental justice
- 26:30in relation to response to a given health outcome.
- 26:33So they're really multiple pathways
- 26:34through which some populations could have
- 26:36a disproportionate burden.
- 26:39Given the sponsor of the seminar,
- 26:41I wanna talk a little bit more about some
- 26:44our ongoing work looking at air pollution
- 26:46health and climate change.
- 26:47This work is not wildfire specific
- 26:49although, we may look at wildfires in here as well
- 26:53but this is work that was funded
- 26:54by the Welcome Trust Institute that has Yuqjang Zang
- 26:57and Northeastern University.
- 26:59And then you'll see our collaborators
- 27:01from multiple universities in Brazil as well.
- 27:04And here we're really focusing on two major cities,
- 27:06San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
- 27:09And these slides are kind of wordy so I apologize.
- 27:12But I'm gonna walk through our ongoing work
- 27:15and our plans for that.
- 27:16So we're gonna use state of the science air quality
- 27:18and climate change modeling to look at what
- 27:21different types of air pollutants might look
- 27:22like in the future for these cities.
- 27:24And for those of you who work with air quality modeling,
- 27:26that's our proposed triple nested modeling domain.
- 27:30For those of you who don't work with that,
- 27:31what that means is we start
- 27:32off with a coarser spatial resolution domain
- 27:35and then use the results from that modeling brand
- 27:38as the inputs and boundary conditions
- 27:39of a smaller domain and so on.
- 27:41And this is a technique that's been used for a very
- 27:43long time to get higher spatial resolution of estimates.
- 27:47We couldn't computationally run the high spatial resolution
- 27:50for the whole country of Brazil, for example.
- 27:52So just to summarize, we really wanna understand
- 27:55air pollution and weather today and in the future.
- 27:57Whether the levels of air pollution and weather
- 28:00throughout these cities today will have
- 28:02very high spatial resolved estimates
- 28:05beyond what we could get from monitors.
- 28:07And we'll also know what they're anticipated to look
- 28:09like in the future for air pollution or climate.
- 28:13Next, we wanna link those exposures to human health.
- 28:16And we're looking at mortality.
- 28:19Brazil as many of know is suffered greatly
- 28:22under the pandemic, and so we have had some struggles
- 28:26getting the health data from the government.
- 28:28This is not a criticism of them because they're busy.
- 28:30So the public health departments in Brazil
- 28:33are very busy dealing with more pressing issues.
- 28:36So that has slowed us down,
- 28:37but we still are getting mortality data
- 28:39for one of our two cities
- 28:41and we'll hopefully get the other city soon.
- 28:43So we really wanna look at how mortality changes
- 28:46from air pollution, heat waves, and also single days
- 28:49of heat and cold under the current climate,
- 28:53and then we'll estimate what
- 28:54those concentration response functions
- 28:57or exposure response functions might imply under
- 28:59future conditions where we've estimated those exposure.
- 29:02So we're linking air pollution or weather and health today,
- 29:05and then we're using this estimates
- 29:07to look at this in the future.
- 29:10Just another point I wanna make
- 29:12is I'm kind of peppering this talk with some
- 29:14of my thoughts on climate change research in general.
- 29:17I believe that it is critically important
- 29:19to understand these systems in the present day,
- 29:22before we start estimating what they look
- 29:24like in the future.
- 29:25So for example, I would like to know how people respond
- 29:29to heat waves in the present day,
- 29:30before we start estimating how people
- 29:32will respond to heat waves in the future.
- 29:34This is not a universally shared position
- 29:36amongst all climate change researchers,
- 29:38climate change and health researchers.
- 29:40And then there's two more tasks of this work
- 29:43I wanna share with you that are really exciting.
- 29:45One is looking at sector specific simulations.
- 29:48So by this, I just mean that we're gonna be able
- 29:50to distinguish between the air pollution coming from traffic
- 29:54the air pollution coming from industry,
- 29:56the air pollution coming from other sources.
- 29:58And so we'll be able to discuss and evaluate which types
- 30:03of sources of air pollution are more or less harmful.
- 30:06And this relates to the comment I made earlier
- 30:09about wildfire particles could potentially
- 30:11be more or less harmful than other types of particles
- 30:14given the different source
- 30:15and the different chemical structure.
- 30:17So here just to summarize what sources are most harmful.
- 30:20And then finally, we wanna look at co-benefits.
- 30:23So we're gonna analyze what would be
- 30:26some potential greenhouse gas emission policies
- 30:29that could take place today, and what would be their impact
- 30:32on not greenhouse gas emissions
- 30:34but on air quality in the short-term.
- 30:37So if we had something that, for example
- 30:40change transportation patterns
- 30:41or increased public transportation
- 30:43that might be a policy for greenhouse gas emissions
- 30:46but it would also likely lower particulate matter
- 30:49ozone, carbon monoxide and other pollutants
- 30:52in the near term, unlike the one to 10 year timeframe.
- 30:55So this term is really most accurately called co-impacts
- 30:59but it's commonly called co-benefits
- 31:02because they tend to be positive benefits.
- 31:04And so we really wanna estimate what are the
- 31:06short-term improvements in air quality from climate change.
- 31:09So next, I've allowed a lot of time for questions.
- 31:12I hope many of you are coming
- 31:13up with some questions or comments,
- 31:15but I just wanna give a few more just concluding thoughts.
- 31:18I just have a few more slides.
- 31:21So these are just some summary of the points
- 31:23that I tried to make today
- 31:24that they're multiple complex pathways
- 31:26through which climate change and wildfires interact.
- 31:30There's changes in the type of fuel,
- 31:32so that's what the wildfire modelers call trees is fuel.
- 31:36So there's changes in the type of fuel that could happen
- 31:39due to climate precipitation,
- 31:41as well as our anthropogenic management of forest,
- 31:44there's changes in the overall warming,
- 31:45there's changes in drought.
- 31:46It's really quite complex.
- 31:49And so we really take these estimates of wildfires
- 31:52in the future as kind of an overall estimate.
- 31:56We wouldn't look at like, what we think is gonna happen
- 31:58on July 5th, 2051 or something like that.
- 32:02But the state of the science models from Loretta Mickley
- 32:05and others show that wildfires are increasing
- 32:07in frequency, duration, and intensity.
- 32:09You'll notice, I didn't say is anticipated to increase.
- 32:12So that was done deliberately.
- 32:14So it was believed that the wildfires are already
- 32:18due to climate change increasing in frequency,
- 32:20we're having more wildfires, they're overall lasting longer
- 32:23and they're overall burning hotter.
- 32:26I wanna re-emphasize the point that exposure patterns
- 32:29due to where people live and where these
- 32:34smokes with fire takes place,
- 32:35the some populations are particularly vulnerable.
- 32:38Populations can also be vulnerable in other ways.
- 32:40One is one group might have a higher health response
- 32:43to exposure from smoke than others.
- 32:45Another is people might have different capacity to mitigate
- 32:48or adapt to these conditions like
- 32:51who can afford to move,
- 32:52who can afford filtration systems and so on.
- 32:55So there's really a lot of complex
- 32:57interesting aspects of vulnerability for wildfire smoke.
- 33:03And even though, as I showed in that review article,
- 33:05there are uncertainties and a lot of research to be done,
- 33:07like looking at birth outcomes and so on,
- 33:10there is overwhelming evidence that wildfire smoke
- 33:12does have a substantial public health burden.
- 33:15And as we anticipate wildfires
- 33:16and wildfire smoke to be higher in the future,
- 33:19we anticipate that burden to go even higher.
- 33:23And we still have some remaining questions.
- 33:25So some of the remaining questions
- 33:26and these are by no means all of them,
- 33:28but some of them are looking at other health outcomes.
- 33:30Most of the work to date has been done for mortality
- 33:33or hospital admissions, but you can imagine there
- 33:34many other health outcomes as well,
- 33:37looking at vulnerabilities, which populations
- 33:39are most vulnerable from a variety of pathways
- 33:42such as ability to adapt,
- 33:44such as baseline health status and so on.
- 33:48There's a lot of work to be done on links
- 33:50to chemical composition is the particles from wildfires
- 33:53will have different chemical structures
- 33:55than particles from other sources, as different sources
- 33:58have different chemical structures and many more.
- 34:01And then I wanna re-highlight this point of of co-impacts,
- 34:05which is commonly called co-benefits
- 34:07with climate change policy.
- 34:09So air quality policies are typically designed to
- 34:13well some of them can be designed for visibility,
- 34:15but they're most air quality policies are designed
- 34:17to protect human health in the short term.
- 34:19And then we have climate change policies
- 34:21that are designed to lower greenhouse gas emissions,
- 34:24but really many of the pathways through
- 34:29which these different policies take place can be similar.
- 34:32As I mentioned one earlier like
- 34:33changes to public transportation,
- 34:35changes to vehicle miles per gallon,
- 34:37lots of things like that.
- 34:38So many of the policies to improve air quality
- 34:42would actually lower greenhouse gas emissions,
- 34:44and many policies to avoid or mitigate climate change
- 34:47would actually improve air quality in the short term.
- 34:49So I believe firmly that both air quality policies
- 34:53and climate change policies typically,
- 34:56have both short-term health consequences
- 34:58and long-term health consequences.
- 35:00This has been known for a very long time
- 35:02but still to this day, they tend to be studied separately
- 35:05and even bigger, they tend to be analyzed
- 35:09in policy domains separately.
- 35:11Not always, there's a growing trend to look at this
- 35:13but overall, these policies tend to be looked at separately.
- 35:17And the point I'm trying to make here is that
- 35:19if we're looking at climate change policies
- 35:21and we wanna think about, for example
- 35:23the cost benefits of a given climate change policy,
- 35:25if we are missing the links to improve air quality
- 35:29in the short term and those health benefits,
- 35:31then we do not have an accurate estimate of the implications
- 35:34of that policy and are not making an informed decision.
- 35:37This links back to my earlier slide about studies
- 35:39looking at the economic impacts of wildfires
- 35:42if we're not incorporating
- 35:43the public health burden from wildfires,
- 35:45then we're grossly underestimating that as well
- 35:48and perhaps not making the most effective decisions.
- 35:51There's some references.
- 35:53So if you asked me for a copy of the slides,
- 35:55I'll be glad to share them with
- 35:56and you can see some of our references.
- 35:58And then finally, I wanna thank the people
- 36:00who really do the work which are my team,
- 36:02and you see many of them there.
- 36:04And so thank all of you
- 36:05and I look forward to your questions and comments.
- 36:09<v ->Thank you, Michelle.</v>
- 36:10This is a wonderful presentation
- 36:12and I'm sure the audience all enjoyed like I did
- 36:16and I'm sure there will be a lot of questions.
- 36:19But just a reminder everyone, if you have questions,
- 36:22please type it in the chat box.
- 36:24We have roughly 20 minutes for the Q and A section.
- 36:28But before that, I will start with some questions
- 36:31that we have already collected from the students actually.
- 36:36So one of the question is kind of related to
- 36:39Michelle you mentioned that we should really
- 36:42try to understand better our present day
- 36:44before we try to protect the future.
- 36:47So one of the questions from students
- 36:49they notice that that a lot of mechanisms
- 36:53are behind the climate change and wildfire
- 36:57is not very well understood.
- 36:59So how can we consider these unknown conditions
- 37:03or mechanisms when people want to do
- 37:07the future projection of wildfires?
- 37:10So how to consider this type of uncertainty?
- 37:14<v ->Yeah, so this is something,</v>
- 37:15so I'm not a wildfire modeler.
- 37:18And I also believe that people who have some caveat
- 37:21in my question right away, and I also believe
- 37:23that people who do that work well, really focus on that.
- 37:28So I wish Loretta Mickley or Yuqjang Zang were here
- 37:31to answer that question.
- 37:32So we know that there's some aspects
- 37:35but notice I'll still answer it.
- 37:36There there's some aspects of the wildfire modeling
- 37:39that we know work really well,
- 37:40and there other aspects that don't work as well,
- 37:43the same thing for estimating PM 2.5 more generally.
- 37:46So we can get pretty good estimates of PM 2.5 total mass,
- 37:50but we don't do as well and we try to look
- 37:51at the different chemical components.
- 37:53So there's really a lot of work
- 37:56looking at validating the models
- 37:59and seeing where it does well and where it doesn't do well.
- 38:02And where does well and doesn't do well
- 38:03could be in a literal where,
- 38:05like it may do well in some topographies than others,
- 38:08it may do well under some conditions than others.
- 38:11And really my understanding from working
- 38:13with the wildfire modelers is that we really wanna think
- 38:16of these as kind of large-scale estimates.
- 38:19So one of the things that we're looking at
- 38:24for the project we hope to get started
- 38:28that we'll be looking at wildfires in Australia,
- 38:31it does improve the underlying emissions inventory.
- 38:33So Loretta and her team have gone through
- 38:36the different pathways and trying to identify
- 38:39which ones are contributing the most to our uncertainty,
- 38:43and which ones are perhaps
- 38:45not perfectly captured by the model,
- 38:47but still maybe not making
- 38:50this big an impact on our estimates.
- 38:52And they have found that the underlying
- 38:54emissions of wildfires, this incorporates things like
- 38:58the fuel, the type of fuel by which I mean trees
- 39:01and vegetation, that that's really critical.
- 39:02So one of the main contributions that we're gonna make,
- 39:05and I really should say that Loretta and her team
- 39:07are gonna make to Australia is
- 39:08to improve those underline emissions inventories.
- 39:11And then we will be making those publicly available
- 39:12for other people as well.
- 39:14I just wanna highlight that some people have asked
- 39:17for a copy of my slides and I put my email in the chat.
- 39:21So if you're interested in a copy of the slides,
- 39:23I'd be glad to send them to you
- 39:24please just shoot me an email, thanks.
- 39:27<v ->Thank you Michelle.</v>
- 39:28I think your talk illustrated the complexity
- 39:33of this multidisciplinary work.
- 39:36So another question from the students
- 39:39they're more interested in how the local communities
- 39:43can do about it in the short term kind of mitigation's way.
- 39:48So can you share some of your suggestions
- 39:51the local community when they're facing the danger
- 39:55from climate change health can they do about it?
- 39:58<v ->Yeah, I wanna share a slide actually.</v>
- 40:03Can you see my slide, did it work?
- 40:05<v ->Yeah, okay.</v>
- 40:06<v ->So this is a figure that I just didn't include</v>
- 40:09an individual level protective measures
- 40:11from our review article.
- 40:13And here you can see we've kind of started at the top
- 40:18with most effective which is to eliminate the exposure.
- 40:21And so this is all based on the individual.
- 40:23This is not based on a like a federal policy.
- 40:26There's many other things they could do as well.
- 40:28So the first one, the biggest impact is to relocate, right?
- 40:36That could be permanent or temporary,
- 40:38but like to temporary relocate when there's wildfires
- 40:40and then there's engineering controls
- 40:42that can reduce exposure by 20 to 90%,
- 40:44depending on the quality of builders,
- 40:46none of them are perfect.
- 40:47You cannot get away from this with filters.
- 40:50Filtering industry doesn't like me to say that,
- 40:51but it's true.
- 40:53And then what we call administrative controls.
- 41:01So I'm gonna take a little bit of water.
- 41:06This vaccine is no joke.
- 41:09But yay science, I'm happy for it.
- 41:10So the third level down to shown in the kind of page
- 41:13is administrative controls.
- 41:15So that's things like staying indoors,
- 41:17avoiding heavy activity outside and so on,
- 41:20and then personal protective equipment
- 41:21like wearing a face mask and so on.
- 41:24And so you can see if we were to unpack
- 41:27this a little bit further, some of these activities
- 41:30are easier than others like wearing a face mask,
- 41:33it's not that hard.
- 41:34Some of them are harder than others,
- 41:35like to literally leave your home.
- 41:37Some of them may be more feasible
- 41:39for some people than others, like the financial cost
- 41:41of relocating, financial cost of filters.
- 41:44And some of them have other implications
- 41:46like social and cultural implications.
- 41:49Like, what does it mean if children
- 41:51can't play outside for months?
- 41:55So all of these things are really,
- 42:00I don't wanna say bandaid solutions,
- 42:01but none of them are fully satisfactory.
- 42:03But there are a variety of things
- 42:05that we've come up with to kind of highlight
- 42:08some things that an individual can do.
- 42:10But really what we'd love to do for exposure
- 42:13is everyone who works environment exposure knows
- 42:15is to stop the exposure itself from happening,
- 42:18rather than trying to address
- 42:20the public health on the backend.
- 42:23<v ->Thanks, Michelle.</v>
- 42:24There's a question from the audience from Glenn Homan,
- 42:28are children more vulnerable to the effects of wildfires.
- 42:32<v ->So that's a really great question.</v>
- 42:35And so I'm gonna couch it in two parts.
- 42:37So the first answer is we really don't know
- 42:39because there hasn't been as much research.
- 42:42The second part of my question is I would suspect yes.
- 42:45So children tend to be more vulnerable than healthy adults
- 42:48to air pollution in general, to particles in general.
- 42:51And there's a variety of reasons.
- 42:53Their systems are still under development.
- 42:56They breathe in more air per body weight than do adults
- 42:59and they historically spend more time outside.
- 43:02Although that's actually changed in the last few generations
- 43:05but historically they spend more time outside.
- 43:06So there's a variety of reasons why children
- 43:08are more susceptible to air pollution
- 43:11writ large than are like other healthy adults.
- 43:14Now, much older populations are also susceptible as well.
- 43:18And so while we don't have the evidence
- 43:20the strong evidence for this for wildfire smoke,
- 43:23I think it's certainly very plausible
- 43:25and I would argue likely
- 43:27that some of those same mechanisms
- 43:28would take place for children in wildfire smoke as well.
- 43:33But this is certainly an area where
- 43:34we need some more studies to really pinpoint it.
- 43:38<v ->Thanks, Michelle.</v>
- 43:39So I know we talk a lot about short-term effects here
- 43:44and the students are also wondering
- 43:47like what can the policymakers do to better report
- 43:54or even do research on the long-term health consequences
- 43:59of the wildfire exposure?
- 44:01<v ->Yeah, so I didn't mean to talk over you.</v>
- 44:06<v ->No, no, no, the student's question is just,</v>
- 44:09do you have any suggestions?
- 44:11What would be the important pieces to focus on
- 44:14such public health (indistinct)
- 44:16and how can we collect those data?
- 44:19<v ->Yeah, so there's a lot there.</v>
- 44:21And in the review article,
- 44:24I think I may have mentioned this
- 44:25that we categorized the health impacts
- 44:27of long-term exposure to wildfires as being more uncertain.
- 44:30So again, I'm gonna kind of answer
- 44:33this in a few different parts.
- 44:34So the first is it's more uncertain for longterm effects,
- 44:38much much more is known about short-term effects.
- 44:42Again, it seems very plausible that both will play a role
- 44:45because they do for particles more broadly, right?
- 44:48Short-term exposure and so by this I mean my exposure today
- 44:52and over the past few days, maybe to a week,
- 44:55my exposure to air pollution or
- 44:56in that timeframe matters for my human health
- 44:58but my exposure over the past several years matters.
- 45:01And actually my exposure in neutral matters,
- 45:03like everything matters.
- 45:05We don't know as much about that for wildfires.
- 45:08Some reasons why it's important to study
- 45:10and difficult to study is that the concentration levels
- 45:14for wildfire smoke are very different from other pollutants.
- 45:18As I mentioned, it's like nothing
- 45:19nothing crazy high, nothing, nothing.
- 45:22So what does it mean if you're getting
- 45:24those stressors or those crazy high?
- 45:27That's my scientific term
- 45:28the crazy high wildfire pollution.
- 45:30If you're getting it several times a year
- 45:33or every year, year after year,
- 45:36as opposed to just the impact from getting it once.
- 45:39And that's very different from kind of like my exposure
- 45:41to traffic particles, which is just going up and down,
- 45:45changes day to day of the week and so on
- 45:48but really is not having these strong events.
- 45:50So it's really these kinds of like huge stressors
- 45:53that come and go away and come and go away.
- 45:55So to understand that we need things
- 45:57like knowing where people have been for several years.
- 46:00We need really good estimates of wildfire exposure
- 46:02over several years, and I predict
- 46:04that some of the future areas of research for this
- 46:07will deal with some of the things on that previous slide
- 46:10relating to the other good question
- 46:11about individual level protective measures.
- 46:13So, this group of people
- 46:17had a pec major filtration systems
- 46:19and trying to stay inside,
- 46:20and these people were not able to.
- 46:22There's a lot of things there that we really need
- 46:24to parse out to really try to get
- 46:26a handle of long-term exposure.
- 46:30<v ->Thanks, Michelle, there are many other questions</v>
- 46:34from the students regarding
- 46:35especially on the review paper.
- 46:40But I also encourage the audience
- 46:42if you have questions to the whole talk,
- 46:45so please feel free to type in your questions.
- 46:48Or if you like, you can unmute yourself
- 46:50and ask the questions.
- 46:52I would just ask them one more question from the students.
- 46:58Kind of related to the individual level
- 47:01what the local communities can do,
- 47:03one of the ways is prescribed burning
- 47:08to mitigate the wildfires.
- 47:10So several students are kind of interesting,
- 47:12as a policymaker, how can you determine whether,
- 47:15just let it burn or do something additional about it.
- 47:21And students are wondering if there are any studies
- 47:26to look at this prescribed burning
- 47:29can we see does it cost effectively prevented the wildfires?
- 47:36<v ->Yeah, so the prescribed burning question</v>
- 47:38is very interesting.
- 47:39There have not been as much study
- 47:43on the health impacts of prescribed burn,
- 47:44but air pollution is air pollution.
- 47:46So prescribed burn which is being done
- 47:48is a forest management strategy
- 47:53is also producing air pollution.
- 47:55And so it's very interesting talking to communities
- 47:57and decision-makers on their different, enforced managers
- 48:01on their different perspectives and the different angles
- 48:05at which they're coming at this issue.
- 48:08So for many people in the community
- 48:09like all fires are bad in their perception,
- 48:12whether it be prescribed burn to stop a larger fire leader
- 48:15or whether it be a wildfire
- 48:17because they're getting the smoke of it regardless.
- 48:20And from a forest management perspective,
- 48:22you often will have prescribed burns
- 48:24deliberately to try to avoid that things later on.
- 48:27And I'm not a forest manager, but like these are done
- 48:31based on scientific research that
- 48:33we need to do this to control our forest.
- 48:36And then from a climate change perspective, we have to think
- 48:41about what does this mean for prescribed burns
- 48:43and the changing in vegetation patterns.
- 48:44Are we gonna have more prescribed burns?
- 48:46Are we gonna have fewer prescribed burns,
- 48:47but like what should we do
- 48:49for prescribed burns is very delicate,
- 48:52especially in terms of the research for air pollution.
- 48:55And I think that's part of why most
- 48:56of the research has really focused on wildfires.
- 49:01I think Rob may have been trying to chime in
- 49:03and then I also see a question in the chat.
- 49:05Rob, were you trying to chime in?
- 49:07<v ->Yeah, the first great, great talk, Michelle.</v>
- 49:12Yeah, I know your research focuses
- 49:15on the wildfire smoke and air pollution,
- 49:18but there's another element that I wonder
- 49:21if it's something that you've considered
- 49:23which is the help that when there are wildfires,
- 49:28people are displaced sometimes short term,
- 49:32sometimes longer term, you know people lose their homes
- 49:36and their lives are disrupted
- 49:38and there are potential health effects of that
- 49:41that could be disruption in medical care.
- 49:44And from what I've gathered, those longer term effects,
- 49:48those types of effects have really been understudied.
- 49:51And I'm just wondering
- 49:52if you have any thoughts about that aspect.
- 49:56<v ->Yeah, this is a really great question</v>
- 49:58and I wanna kind of unpack several things.
- 50:00So there's a lot to learn about
- 50:05our response to environmental disasters.
- 50:07And what does that mean in respect to human health?
- 50:10And what does that mean for respect to physical health?
- 50:13What does that mean with respect to mental health?
- 50:15What does it mean in respect to disruption of healthcare?
- 50:19There's some really great work that was done
- 50:21by a former master student, Leo Goldsmith
- 50:23who looked at a variety of ways
- 50:25in which the LGBTQ community has disproportionate impacts
- 50:29from environmental hazards.
- 50:30But one of them is disaster response
- 50:32where LGBTQ+ individuals are turned away at shelters,
- 50:37don't have access to their medication and so on.
- 50:41And then there's the
- 50:42also the issue of who can afford to move.
- 50:43There's also some great work being done
- 50:45by my PhD student Kate Burroughs, looking at displacement
- 50:49and migration from landslides in Indonesia
- 50:52and looking at the mental health
- 50:55and wellbeing aspects there's as well.
- 50:57But there hasn't been as much for wildfires.
- 50:59And I think it's something that probably
- 51:01needs to be looked at and I'm expanding it out
- 51:04to disasters more broadly.
- 51:05So like hurricanes, wildfires just
- 51:09the environmental disasters that we anticipate
- 51:11to be growing under climate change to happen more
- 51:14often to happen in a more intense way,
- 51:16what does this mean for the economic
- 51:19and health costs of relocation?
- 51:21What does it mean for the economic disruption
- 51:23of that community if people have to get up and leave?
- 51:26I mean there's all sorts of things that communities
- 51:28have talked about with me and wildfires in terms of things
- 51:31like my housing price.
- 51:35And there's designs of homes where you can like
- 51:39try to make sure you don't have brush near the house
- 51:43so that if it's a wildfire
- 51:44it doesn't zoom up on your house and so on,
- 51:47these things, it was very clear to me that these things
- 51:50are taking a mental toll as well.
- 51:53So I think this is a very understudied issue
- 51:56and I think there are multiple facets to it
- 51:59where different populations are affected differently.
- 52:01And this is something we really should be looking into.
- 52:07Can I answer the question in the chat next?
- 52:09Kai, is that okay?
- 52:10<v ->Yeah, please go on.</v> <v ->Okay, great.</v>
- 52:12Do you want me to read it?
- 52:14<v ->No, no, no, please go ahead.</v>
- 52:17<v ->Okay, I'm gonna read it.</v>
- 52:19And this is from Evan Brockman.
- 52:21As the climate health researcher,
- 52:22what changes would you like to see
- 52:23in data collection in regards to air quality?
- 52:25We are discussing what to add to our EHR as clinicians
- 52:28who directly see patients
- 52:29who suffer after exposure, thank you.
- 52:31So with respect to data, I'm not sure if the person
- 52:37that's in the question is thinking of health data
- 52:40or air pollution data.
- 52:41It kind of seems that maybe health data
- 52:45but I'm gonna answer all those questions (laughing).
- 52:48So with respect to air quality,
- 52:50we really need more monitors in rural areas,
- 52:54not just to try to study those populations
- 52:57'cause they're different but also the air pollution
- 52:59could be different as well.
- 53:00We are really hindered.
- 53:01This is worldwide by having our monitors
- 53:03being predominantly located in urban areas.
- 53:06With respect to human health,
- 53:07I think that there's some types of data sources
- 53:09for human health that we can get a pretty good handle on,
- 53:12like hospital emissions, mortality and other things
- 53:16that it's much harder to get a handle on.
- 53:18And just to get back to Professor Dubrow's point,
- 53:22like mental health and wellbeing.
- 53:24And so I think that some of those
- 53:28perhaps under the surface types of health outcomes
- 53:32that could have an enormous public health burden
- 53:33are ones that we really probably should start looking at
- 53:36more in relation to air pollution.
- 53:38I hope I've answered your question.
- 53:39I'm not sure if I misunderstood it, thank you.
- 53:45<v ->Michelle, I think there's another, yeah.</v>
- 53:48<v ->Okay, I'm gonna ask this, is the dense network</v>
- 53:50of low cost air quality sensors
- 53:52good enough to serve as input to your models.
- 53:54Well, it depends on the model and on the monitor.
- 53:58So we're often modeling at a nation level.
- 54:02So we would need like a huge network.
- 54:06And the low cost air quality centers,
- 54:09so cost and quality are associated in air quality monitors.
- 54:12So a low cost monitor can measure very, very well
- 54:15depending on what it's measuring or it might not,
- 54:18that's not a negative comment on those monitors.
- 54:20Sometimes that's perfectly good for your purposes.
- 54:24So I guess my short answer would be,
- 54:26it really kind of depends.
- 54:31<v ->Michelle, I have a question, all right?</v>
- 54:33You mentioned that I think why you initiated this study
- 54:38to look at the wildfires because when you look
- 54:41at previous reports on almost no damage
- 54:44was taking into account with the health burden,
- 54:47I think it speaks true for all
- 54:49the other extreme weather and climate change.
- 54:53So would you like to share more source more broadly
- 54:59the economy burden on climate change
- 55:01and how as a researcher, what we should do about it?
- 55:05<v ->Yeah, so I think that is, I alluded to</v>
- 55:09I think that human health is missing
- 55:11from part of the climate change discussion.
- 55:13And by the discussion I mean, in political decisions
- 55:18and in the general press and the mass media
- 55:21and in community discussions.
- 55:23And so there's a very different response to learning
- 55:29that sea level rise might impact a country halfway
- 55:32around the world, as opposed to learning that asthma rates
- 55:36in your community are likely to go up.
- 55:38We can discuss the ethics of that, but that's a reality.
- 55:42And I showed that slide at the beginning
- 55:45of the climate change human health articles
- 55:46have really been skyrocketing, but I personally believe
- 55:50it hasn't really caught up
- 55:51with the kind of the general discussion.
- 55:55So still when people talk about climate change
- 55:57they're often not talking about human health or not as much.
- 56:02And if you look at the predominant reasons
- 56:04that people have moved on environmental issues,
- 56:06the number one reason people care about the environment
- 56:08in most surveys is human health,
- 56:12although other things matter.
- 56:13So I think that's why Yale center
- 56:15and other work on the human health impacts of climate
- 56:18are really important for people to really understand
- 56:20the full magnitude of what climate change means.
- 56:24We're not just talking about loss of species,
- 56:26were not just talking about loss of land,
- 56:28we're not just talking about ecosystem changes
- 56:30but we're talking about actual changes in human health,
- 56:33which will be a huge driver for many people.
- 56:39<v ->Thanks Michelle, for the very insightful comments.</v>
- 56:42And I think we do have the last comment
- 56:45from a Pin Wom, thanks for the informative talk.
- 56:48How was the threshold for smoke we've determined.
- 56:51As you mentioned the smoke pollution
- 56:53is like non-crazy high num pattern.
- 56:56How important was the definition of threshold in this study?
- 57:01<v ->Yeah, similar to how you might do with heat waves,</v>
- 57:05we used a variety of thresholds, so we varied it.
- 57:08And we saw results that you would anticipate.
- 57:11So as we made the requirement more stringent,
- 57:14meaning we're forcing those smoke waves to be more extreme
- 57:18we saw higher health impacts.
- 57:19And then if we lax the response
- 57:22and allow the smaller smoke waves
- 57:24like you still have walked our air pollution,
- 57:26but it's not as high,
- 57:27we still saw an effect and it was lower.
- 57:28So I guess the short answer is it matters in terms
- 57:33of your specific numerical health effect estimate.
- 57:38But it didn't matter in the sense
- 57:40that we found effects at different types of definitions.
- 57:45And this makes sense too
- 57:46because there's nothing like magical,
- 57:48like two days matters, but three days doesn't,
- 57:51two and a half to, you know what I mean?
- 57:52So these are all like approximations.
- 57:54They're just trying to capture the smoke wave period.
- 57:57<v ->Wonderful, thank you Michelle.</v>
- 57:59I think I can speak
- 58:00for the whole center and all the audience.
- 58:02Thank you for giving us a wonderful and informative talk.
- 58:07And thank you all the audiences attending today.
- 58:10I think at a peak, we have almost 90 audiences.
- 58:15<v ->Oh great, thank you so much</v>
- 58:16for the invitation to share my work.