Wildfire smoke contributes to thousands of deaths each year in the U.S.

Wildfire smoke covered huge swaths of the U.S. in 2023, including places like New York City, where it has historically been uncommon.

Together, the studies point to an underappreciated threat to public health, says Yiqun Ma, a researcher at Yale and an author of the second study. “It’s not obvious, necessarily, if you’re looking at any individual case,” says Sam Heft-Neal, an environmental economist at Stanford and an author of the NBER study. Stepping back and looking at the data statistically makes the picture much clearer, he says: smoke is a big problem that is contributing to thousands of deaths already in the U.S.

The exact mechanisms by which smoke impacts people’s health are still being unraveled. Some evidence suggests that wildfire smoke is more harmful than other tiny particles, like pollution from fossil fuel combustion or fine dust. It’s likely more harmful smoke is produced when wildfires burn through urban areas, where everything from houses full of insulation to car batteries, and metal are torched.

By 2050, the overall annual economic cost credited to lives lost from wildfire smoke could reach $240 billion, according to the NBER analysis. That is larger than previous estimates of all climate-related damages combined—including direct costs related to wildfire and tropical cyclone damages.The NBER analysis used a suite of different computer models, trained on fire observations from 2000 to 2021, to figure out the relationship between fire activity and how much smoke was produced.

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