Landscape fires reason for 90% pollution related deaths globally: Study

Over 90 per cent of the global deaths per year linked to air pollution from landscape fires were in low and middle-income countries, including India, according to a study published in The Lancet journal.

Other countries with the highest burdens of disease due to landscape fires, including wildfires, were China, Indonesia and those in the sub-Saharan Africa.

The findings highlighted geographic and socioeconomic inequalities in how landscape fires affect public health, an international team of researchers, including those from Monash University, Australia, found.

Landscape fires occur in natural and built-up settings and can include both forest fires and those caused due to human activities. Most of the resulting deaths are related to the air pollution caused due to such fires, contributing to long-term cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses.

The study attributed roughly 0.45 million deaths a year to heart-related conditions and about 0.22 million deaths annually to respiratory diseases, revealing an increasing number of global deaths associated with pollution resulting from landscape fires.

The researchers analysed yearly deaths, population and socio-demographic data from across 204 countries and territories during 2000-2019, taken from the 2019 Global Burden of Diseases Study. It is coordinated by the the Institute of Health Metrics (IHME), University of Washington, US, and provides the "largest and most comprehensive" estimates of health lost around the world over time.

With climate change becoming more intense, the authors called for urgent action to mitigate the health effects of air pollution from landscape fires.

They also stressed on addressing the socioeconomic disparities in death rates by providing financial and technological support from high-income countries to help more vulnerable developing countries.

The team said these efforts would need to be coupled with with climate mitigation and adaptation policies, to manage the health impacts of landscape fire-related air pollution.

The Global Fire Emissions Database was also used in the analysis.