Hospitalization Due to Fire-Induced Pollution in the Brazilian Legal Amazon from 2005 to 2018

Abstract

Fire is widely used in the Amazon as a ubiquitous driver of land management and land cover change. Regardless of their purpose, fires release a considerable amount of pollutants into the atmosphere, with severe consequences for human health. This paper adds to the extant literature by measuring the causal effect of fires on hospitalizations, using the approach of instrumental variables, whose validity is assessed with multiple statistical tests. A wide range of confounders are added as covariates, seizing on the accuracy enhancement potential of a broad and fine-grained dataset that covers 14 years of the whole Amazon territory at a municipal–monthly level. The results reveal a positive effect of fire on hospitalizations due to respiratory illnesses in general, and particularly in those due to asthma. A 1% increase in pollution concentration would increase hospitalizations by 0.14% at a municipality–monthly level. A total of 5% of respiratory hospitalizations were estimated to be attributable to fire-induced pollution, corresponding to 822 cases per month. The analysis demonstrates that the coupling of econometrics and remote sensing data is a promising avenue towards the assessment of impacts caused by fires, which may be applied to other regions of the world subjected to anthropogenic fires.

Amazon fires in the 21st century: The year of 2020 in evidence

“…Fire is among the major types of disturbance responsible for forest degradation in the Amazon (Matricardi et al, 2020; Tyukavina et al, 2017), having negative impacts on rain‐forest structure and dynamics that can compromise forest carbon stocks and the capacity of forests to act as carbon sinks for more than a decade (Pontes‐Lopes et al, 2021; Rappaport et al, 2018; Silva et al, 2020). The health of people living in the Amazon can also be affected directly by large‐scale and frequent fires because they accentuate air pollution during the fire season, leading to hospitalizations from respiratory illnesses (Butt et al, 2021; Campanharo et al, 2021; Sant'Anna et al, 2020).…”

Fire Dynamics in an Emerging Deforestation Frontier in Southwestern Amazonia, Brazil

“…Highway construction and paving projects, such as that for Highway BR-319 [93,94], represent a major axis for illegal activities such as deforestation, logging, and land grabbing due to the lack of governance in the Amazon region [16,47,90,95]. This situation is worsened by a joint ordinance issued on 2 December 2020 [96] that transfers responsibility for the process of "land regularization" from the federal government to the municipal level.…”

“…Plans for "sustainable" forest management for timber invariably assume that the managed areas will never be burned [107]. A study in northern Amazonia of the added effect of fire on logging impact found that fires during the 2015-2016 drought increased the impact of logging by 146.5% as compared to the impact of the logging itself, mainly by increasing the area catching fire and secondarily by increasing tree mortality in areas that catch fire if logged [16]. The role of fire in greatly increasing the impact of logging implies that Amazonian Forest management projects are largely unsustainable [16].…”

“…Amazon forest fires can impact vegetation integrity and biodiversity [2][3][4][5], resulting in changes in the forest hydrological functions [6] and carbon storage [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Forest fire also causes economic losses and human respiratory diseases [14][15][16][17], and the cost of controlling fire with field brigades and aircraft is extremely high [18,19].…”

“…It is estimated that 58% of the Amazon is currently too wet to support fires and that climate change could reduce these areas to 37% by 2050 [25][26][27]. The increase in forest fires in the Amazon is directly related to extreme drought events [7,15,16,28], and these extremes can lead to a fire in regions where trees have thin bark and other characteristics making them more vulnerable to damage from fires [27,[29][30][31] Deforestation is a driver of forest fires in the Amazonian Forest because fire is used both to clear the land after felling the native forest and as a management tool in alreadydeforested land [32][33][34][35]. Fire usage for managing agriculture, and especially for controlling the encroachment of woody vegetation into cattle pasture, is the main source of ignition threatening adjacent forests.…”