Spatially differentiated health impacts and costs of fine particulate matter exposure from agriculture waste management in Thailand

Abstract

The agricultural sector in Thailand contributes to air pollution, due to the practice of open burning of agricultural wastes. An in depth-analysis of regionalized health impacts and related damage costs of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure were computed for the 77 provinces of Thailand by parameterizing PM2.5 characterization model. The characterization factors for PM2.5 showed a wide variation for the various provinces ranging between 2 and 130 h of healthy population lifetime loss per kg PM2.5 emitted. The factors were applied to compare the agricultural waste management of major crops (rice, sugarcane, maize, cassava, and oil palm) in Thailand between the business-as-usual scenario representing current management practices and five alternative scenarios of agricultural waste utilization or open burning. The total health impacts and damage costs of the business-as-usual scenario were 732,065 DALYs and 425 billion Thai Baht (THB), respectively. The open burning alternative scenario yielded additional damage of 524 billion THB. The alternative scenarios of management via animal feed, fertilizer, residues left in the field, and electricity generation provided economic benefits (431, 427, 422, and 399 billion THB, respectively). In this study, using the global average factor to assess the overall health impacts of PM2.5 emissions in Thailand resulted in an underestimation of health impacts as compared to province-specific factors. While substituting province-specific factors with country average factor yields similar overall results at the country level, using province-specific factors are important to capture the large variability of impacts across individual provinces. In addition to developing a tool to quantify the PM2.5 related health impacts of various agricultural wastes in Thailand, recommendations on the implementation of the alternative scenarios have also been outlined in the study.