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.
Highlights
Biomass burning in agriculture is a global source of air pollution and, of morbimortality
Despite having available data for the last two decades (2001–2020), not all variables were available for this whole period; the time window of analysis started in August 2005 and ended in December 2018
17.3 μ/m teraction between the wind direction and pollutants from neighboring municipalities as deviation, or a 107% increase compared to the average) in PM2.5 levels causes an average an instrumental variable, the authors found that an increase of 17.3 μ/m3 (one standard increase of ~1.5% (0.95 hospitalizations per 100,000 inhabitants) in total hospitalizations
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Biomass burning in agriculture is a global source of air pollution and, of morbimortality. The practice, which is more frequently reported in developing countries—. Such as China, India, and Brazil [1], and Indonesia [2]—has been evidenced as a source of respiratory illnesses and related hospitalizations [2,3,4,5,6,7]. In addition to the impairment of health and eventual premature mortality [8], already overloaded national healthcare systems are subjected to higher pressure
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