The Impacts of Changing Climate on Wildfire Smoke Toxicity: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Scientific Literature to Support Public Health and Ecosystems Protection

Climate change is altering the frequency, intensity, and scale of wildfire activity, with significant impacts on public health and downwind ecosystems.  Anticipating the extent and nature of present and future health and ecosystems impacts of smoke exposure and deposition is not a simple matter for climate change models and air quality models based on current smoke emissions inventories.  Changing climate can be expected to affect fundamental processes that will influence the composition and toxicity of biomass burning smoke, including the species, form and moisture status of fire fuels; the frequencies of drought versus extreme precipitation; meteorological patterns that favor sustained burning; synoptic weather patterns that can transport smoke long distances, facilitating the photo-oxidation of carbonaceous particles; as well as the conditions that promote the presence of soil, ambient dust and bioaerosols in smoke plumes.  Climate warming further influences the impacts of smoke by, for example, predisposing sensitive individuals to respiratory effects from smoke through heat stress.  Downwind ecosystems already stressed by climate change pressures may become especially vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of smoke deposition.  An evaluation of these contributing stresses and other, indirect processes that may determine the ultimate toxicity of a fire plume is necessary for a realistic accounting of the costs of climate change-impacted wildfires on human society, and the ecosystems upon which it depends.  This presentation will introduce a cross-disciplinary approach that we are applying to assessing the impacts of changing climate on the underlying processes that ultimately determine smoke composition, including biomass burning emissions, soil, dust and bioaerosols, and toxicity at the point of human exposure and landscape deposition.   We will discuss the status of the literature synthesis and assessment, insights from our work to date and address scientific uncertainties with potentially important consequences for the smoke toxicity projections.   We will also discuss the need for and a potential architecture for a sustained community knowledge system to support climate policy and adaptation strategy development for complex, interdisciplinary problems such as these.

Impact/Purpose

This presentation is primarily intended to engage the interest of external experts in wildfire processes, primary smoke composition and photochemistry in our assessment project.  We will present the conceptual framework of the assessment and preliminary conclusions concerning the sensitivities of wildfire smoke toxicity to changing climate conditions.

Citation

Hemming, Brooke L. AND Anne E. Barkley. The Impacts of Changing Climate on Wildfire Smoke Toxicity: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Scientific Literature to Support Public Health and Ecosystems Protection. American Geophysical Meeting, Fall 2023, San Francisco, CA, December 11 - 15, 2023.

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