How Badly Does Smoke From Wildfires Affect Human Health?

It’s becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence: to look outside your window and see the place where you live suffused with smoke from nearby wildfires. In 2023, this was especially noticeable for residents of the New York metropolitan area, who got to see the sky turning unexpected colors as a result of smoke from wildfires wafting down from Canada.

New York City isn’t the only region to deal with that issue as of late. And with wildfires becoming more common in recent years, you might find yourself wondering what the health effects of breathing in wildfire smoke might be. A paper published this week in Nature sought to better understand smoke’s connection to mortality — and the results led the authors to contend that “the health impacts of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the U.S.”

The researchers who worked on the study noted that “climate conditions” are not the only factor with an impact on emissions caused by wildfires — but also that these emissions will grow more widespread in the coming years. That could have serious health consequences; as the paper’s authors phrased it, “smoke exposure increases mortality rates not only in the year of exposure but also in the following years.”

Historic Grand Canyon Lodge Burns in Wildfires

It isn’t the only building affected by these wildfires

Stanford University’s Marshall Burke, one of the paper’s authors, told NPR that smoke inhalation could contribute to other chronic conditions that put people’s health at risk. “[W]hat we know from decades of research, and what we find again in this study, is that breathing dirty air just exacerbates a range of things that make us sick.”

Inhaling smoke is also not the only way fires can put people’s health at risk. Earlier this year, The New York Times wrote about the toxic aftereffects of wildfires around Los Angeles; it’s one more area of concern to consider following these already-sobering findings.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…