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The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires
BACKGROUND: Indonesian peatlands have been drained for agricultural development for several decades. This development has made a major contribution to economic development. At the same time, peatland drainage is causing significant air pollution resulting from peatland fires. Peatland fires occur ev...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35790967 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w |
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author | Hein, Lars Spadaro, Joseph V. Ostro, Bart Hammer, Melanie Sumarga, Elham Salmayenti, Resti Boer, Rizaldi Tata, Hesti Atmoko, Dwi Castañeda, Juan-Pablo |
author_facet | Hein, Lars Spadaro, Joseph V. Ostro, Bart Hammer, Melanie Sumarga, Elham Salmayenti, Resti Boer, Rizaldi Tata, Hesti Atmoko, Dwi Castañeda, Juan-Pablo |
author_sort | Hein, Lars |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Indonesian peatlands have been drained for agricultural development for several decades. This development has made a major contribution to economic development. At the same time, peatland drainage is causing significant air pollution resulting from peatland fires. Peatland fires occur every year, even though their extent is much larger in dry (El Niño) years. We examine the health effects of long-term exposure to fine particles (PM(2.5)) from all types of peatland fires (including the burning of above and below ground biomass) in Sumatra and Kalimantan, where most peatland fires in Indonesia take place. METHODS: We derive PM(2.5) concentrations from satellite imagery calibrated and validated with Indonesian Government data on air pollution, and link increases in these concentrations to peatland fires, as observed in satellite imagery. Subsequently, we apply available epidemiological studies to relate PM(2.5) exposure to a range of health outcomes. The model utilizes the age distribution and disease prevalence of the impacted population. RESULTS: We find that PM(2.5) air pollution from peatland fires, causes, on average, around 33,100 adults and 2900 infants to die prematurely each year from air pollution. In addition, peatland fires cause on average around 4390 additional hospitalizations related to respiratory diseases, 635,000 severe cases of asthma in children, and 8.9 million lost workdays. The majority of these impacts occur in Sumatra because of its much higher population density compared to Kalimantan. A main source of uncertainty is in the Concentration Response Functions (CRFs) that we use, with different CRFs leading to annual premature adult mortality ranging from 19,900 to 64,800 deaths. Currently, the population of both regions is relatively young. With aging of the population over time, vulnerabilities to air pollution and health effects from peatland fires will increase. CONCLUSIONS: Peatland fire health impacts provide a further argument to combat fires in peatlands, and gradually transition to peatland management models that do not require drainage and are therefore not prone to fire risks. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9256533 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92565332022-07-06 The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires Hein, Lars Spadaro, Joseph V. Ostro, Bart Hammer, Melanie Sumarga, Elham Salmayenti, Resti Boer, Rizaldi Tata, Hesti Atmoko, Dwi Castañeda, Juan-Pablo Environ Health Research BACKGROUND: Indonesian peatlands have been drained for agricultural development for several decades. This development has made a major contribution to economic development. At the same time, peatland drainage is causing significant air pollution resulting from peatland fires. Peatland fires occur every year, even though their extent is much larger in dry (El Niño) years. We examine the health effects of long-term exposure to fine particles (PM(2.5)) from all types of peatland fires (including the burning of above and below ground biomass) in Sumatra and Kalimantan, where most peatland fires in Indonesia take place. METHODS: We derive PM(2.5) concentrations from satellite imagery calibrated and validated with Indonesian Government data on air pollution, and link increases in these concentrations to peatland fires, as observed in satellite imagery. Subsequently, we apply available epidemiological studies to relate PM(2.5) exposure to a range of health outcomes. The model utilizes the age distribution and disease prevalence of the impacted population. RESULTS: We find that PM(2.5) air pollution from peatland fires, causes, on average, around 33,100 adults and 2900 infants to die prematurely each year from air pollution. In addition, peatland fires cause on average around 4390 additional hospitalizations related to respiratory diseases, 635,000 severe cases of asthma in children, and 8.9 million lost workdays. The majority of these impacts occur in Sumatra because of its much higher population density compared to Kalimantan. A main source of uncertainty is in the Concentration Response Functions (CRFs) that we use, with different CRFs leading to annual premature adult mortality ranging from 19,900 to 64,800 deaths. Currently, the population of both regions is relatively young. With aging of the population over time, vulnerabilities to air pollution and health effects from peatland fires will increase. CONCLUSIONS: Peatland fire health impacts provide a further argument to combat fires in peatlands, and gradually transition to peatland management models that do not require drainage and are therefore not prone to fire risks. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w. BioMed Central 2022-07-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9256533/ /pubmed/35790967 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Hein, Lars Spadaro, Joseph V. Ostro, Bart Hammer, Melanie Sumarga, Elham Salmayenti, Resti Boer, Rizaldi Tata, Hesti Atmoko, Dwi Castañeda, Juan-Pablo The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title | The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title_full | The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title_fullStr | The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title_full_unstemmed | The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title_short | The health impacts of Indonesian peatland fires |
title_sort | health impacts of indonesian peatland fires |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35790967 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w |
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