Crop Fires and Cardiovascular Health – A Study from North India

Abstract

We examine the impact of exposure to biomass burning events (primarily crop burning) on the prevalence of hypertension in four North Indian states. We use data from the National Family Health Survey-IV for 2015-16 and employ a multivariate logistic and linear model to estimate the effect of exposure to biomass burning on the prevalence of hypertension and blood pressure, respectively. The adjusted odds ratio of hypertension among individuals living in areas with high intensity of biomass (HIB) burning (defined as exposure to 100 fire-events during the past 30 days) is 1.15 [95% CI: 1.003–1.32]. The odds ratios further increase at a higher intensity of biomass burning and downwind fires are found to be responsible for the negative effect of fires on cardiovascular health. We also find that the systolic and diastolic blood pressure for older cohorts is significantly higher due to exposure to HIB. We estimate that elimination of HIB would prevent loss of 70–91 thousand DALYs every year and 1.73 to 2.24 Billion USD (in PPP terms) over 5 years by reducing the prevalence of hypertension. Therefore, curbing biomass burning will be associated with significant health and economic benefits in North India.

Evaluating methods to map burned area at 30-meter resolution in forests and agricultural areas of Central India

“…We included water as a separate label as it is often confused with burn scars. Identifying shadow was also important as it is also confused with burned area (Singh P. et al, 2021). We included forest area with leaf fallen off and agricultural area with no crops as labels because they are season-specific land classes that may 10.3389/ffgc.2022.933807 otherwise confuse classification (Supplementary Figure 2).…”

“…Quantifying fires accurately is important to understand drivers of fire, and impact of fire on fragmentation, edge effects (Cochrane and Laurance, 2002) and biodiversity. Quantifying fires accurately is also crucial in studies on economics and health due to contribution of fires to pollution and health (Agarwala and Chandel, 2020;Singh P. et al, 2021). Finally, quantifying fires accurately is critical to create accurate carbon inventories to inform climate models (Shiraishi et al, 2021).…”

“…While several indices have been known to perform well in areas with heterogeneous forest cover, low biomass and small fires (Fornacca et al, 2018), few studies exist for India. Studies on spectral indices for mapping burned area in India use only Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), and Normalized Different Water Index (NDWI) as indices, that are used in combination to identify multiple thresholds for burned area mapping (Babu et al, 2018;Kalaranjini et al, 2020;Singh P. et al, 2021). Confusion between water and burned area still remains (Singh P. et al, 2021), which some scholars address by masking out water areas before quantifying fires (Babu et al, 2018).…”

“…Studies on spectral indices for mapping burned area in India use only Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), and Normalized Different Water Index (NDWI) as indices, that are used in combination to identify multiple thresholds for burned area mapping (Babu et al, 2018;Kalaranjini et al, 2020;Singh P. et al, 2021). Confusion between water and burned area still remains (Singh P. et al, 2021), which some scholars address by masking out water areas before quantifying fires (Babu et al, 2018). Alternatively, addition of these indices as inputs into a classification algorithm may increase classification accuracies (Pu and Gong, 2004;Ba et al, 2019).…”

Can Forest Fires Be an Important Factor in the Reduction in Solar Power Production in India?

“…Wildfires and biomass burning are among the major important sources of carbonaceous aerosols, greenhouse gases, ozone precursors, trace gases, and particulate pollutant emissions in several regions, including Asia [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. The impacts of forest fires and biomass burning on aerosols, air pollution, and radiative forcing over northern India were well documented in several earlier papers [3,9,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], and are hence not repeated here.…”