Researchers have crunched data on excess deaths and calculated that Canada’s 2023 wildfire season shortened the lives of 82,000 people worldwide.
The smokiest days caused about 5,400 acute extra deaths across North America alone, according to the research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
That means wildfire smoke is about as deadly as prostate cancer, Michael Brauer told The Tyee.
Brauer is a co-author of the study and professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, and an affiliate professor and principal research scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where he leads the Environmental Risk Factors team for the Global Burden of Disease.
Brauer says he hopes these numbers will help Canadians reconsider the seriousness of wildfire smoke. In short, he says, it’s a hazard to be avoided rather than a nuisance that disrupts their summer vacation.
“We’re not doing enough to take this seriously,” he told The Tyee.
The very young, very old, pregnant people and people with pre-existing health conditions are most at risk from wildfire smoke.
But Brauer says his study helps underline how there is no safe level of exposure for anyone.
When the plume of smoke from the 2023 Canadian fires reached Europe, for example, it would have hardly been noticeable, he said, but it still caused 22,400 premature deaths because it drifted through heavily populated areas, according to the study.
“Every amount of exposure that you get over your lifetime actually contributes to an increased risk of dying earlier than you would have if you weren’t exposed to smoke,” he said.
In consideration of this, Brauer says Canadians need to “start thinking about summer a little differently,” and avoiding outdoor events during peak smoke season.
“We don’t put ourselves in situations where you’ve got hundreds of kids at an outdoor day camp when it gets smoky,” Brauer says. “Or an outdoor music festival with tens of thousands of people out in the smoke.”
Unfortunately, avoiding smoky air isn’t possible for industries that require workers to be outside during smoky weather.
Agricultural workers, for example, “have to be in the orchard when the fruit is ripe,” said Robyn Bunn, a collective member with Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture Okanagan. “That’s the nature of the job,”
Bunn, who’s been working with RAMA for more than a decade, says she’s witnessed the escalating impacts of climate change without action taken to protect workers.
She says to keep workers safe the government needs to introduce regulations that require employers to provide personal protective equipment and require employee housing have mechanical air conditioning and air filtration.
“Unless it’s made clear in regulations and it’s enforceable, employers will be able to say, ‘it’s not our problem,’” she said.
There aren’t any specific workplace regulations that protect workers against extreme heat or smoke, Bunn says. While legislation such as the Workers Compensation Act requires employers to provide a safe workplace, it leaves the definition of “safe” too vague to be useful.
That isn’t keeping employees safe, Bunn said.
Temporary migrant workers are technically allowed to refuse unsafe work and to advocate to their supervisor and employer for safer workplace conditions, but in practice, that will likely get them fired and sent home, Bunn said.
“Their employer can fire them and send them home for any reason and they have very little recourse,” she said. As a result, workers often work through dangerous conditions.
Only N95 and industrial respirator masks can protect against the tiny particles in wildfire smoke. Bunn says employers are not providing workers with N95s.
“Sometimes workers aren’t even given N95s while they’re spraying pesticides,” she said. “PPE is just not made available in general.”
Agricultural workers who live on site also often don’t get any respite from the heat and smoke because housing, which is often provided by the employer, doesn’t have indoor air conditioning or air filtration, she said. That can lead to dangerous indoor temperatures and often pushes workers to grab a blanket and sleep outside — which then exposes them to more smoke, Bunn said.
RAMA Okanagan and United Way have been working to distribute N95s and host workshops teaching workers how to build their own affordable and effective indoor air filtration systems, but that’s really something employers should be doing, she said.
Brauer says providing air purification systems to vulnerable or impoverished populations is “cost effective” because it will keep people out of hospitals in the long run, which would save the government money.
He also advocated for HEPA filters to be installed in all places where the very young and very old spend lots of time, like schools and long-term care facilities.
The Tyee recently asked the Ministry of Infrastructure and the largest school districts in B.C. — Surrey, Vancouver, Coquitlam, Burnaby and Langley — to ask how school air gets cleaned.
The ministry told The Tyee it is not currently tracking which schools have HEPA filters. None of the school districts The Tyee contacted directly answered a question on how many of their classrooms have HEPA filters and how many do not.
The wildfire smoke caused 5,400 acute deaths and 64,300 chronic deaths in North America and Europe that summer, according to the study.
Acute deaths happen during the smoke exposure and are calculated by looking at how many people were expected to die in a given area on a given day, and then seeing how many excess deaths there were when the smoke rolled in, Brauer said.
In a city like Vancouver, you might see, for example, 40 deaths per day, he said. That number will be fairly consistent throughout the year, with deaths spiking to maybe 50 or 60 a day during cold and flu season, or 100 deaths a day during an extreme heat event, he added.
Researchers were able to look at how many deaths were expected in hundreds of cities around the world and use that data to calculate how many excess deaths, or acute deaths, there were when Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed the skies.
Chronic deaths are more of a measure of how much a life was shortened, or who is expected to die prematurely, Brauer said. Researchers calculate this by comparing populations from different cities and accounting for things like smoking, diet and activity levels. When all of these “risk factors for death” are accounted for, the leftover numbers can be attributed to air pollution.
Chronic deaths happen when wildfire smoke exposure speeds up other pre-existing health conditions such as heart disease and cognitive decline, he said.
Brauer said Canada’s 2023 fire season was the “perfect storm,” with huge fires and weather patterns that blew smoke over heavily populated areas. That year’s fires produced roughly three to five times the amount of smoke that fires in 2021 and 2017 did.
And it’s just going to get worse.
“This is exactly what the climate models said was going to happen,” he said. “We’re going to have record-setting smoke seasons every year and it’s going to continue for 50 to 60, maybe even 100 years.”
Michelle Gamage/Local Journalism Initiative Reporter/The Tyee
