PETMEET

“The Effects of Fire on People

Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.

Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart.

Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.

How Fire Impacts Wildlife

Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.

Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.

For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.

“A study last year predicted that some of the 19 polar bear subpopulations in the countries that ring the Arctic Circle could suffer devastating declines by the end of the century if climate change continues unchecked.The less access researchers have to the animals, the less data are collected, and the more difficult it becomes to detect changes in the health of polar bear subpopulations over time, Atwood said.In addition, there is less information that could give scientists a deeper understanding of how polar bear populations are responding to a variety of climate change stressors, including pathogens, pollutants and contaminants, as well as the effects of sea ice loss on the food chain the bears depend on... Researchers have documented the relationship between polar bears and climate change in the south Beaufort subpopulation, which declined by roughly 40 percent from 2005 to 2009. ”