It usually falls in the middle of the rainy season in Los Angeles County in early January. Moisture coaxes the brown landscape into green tones, but not in 2024. In the last six months of the year, only 0.16 inches of rain fell downtown, with the area at about four inches normal. From July to October, there is no measurable rainfall at all.
The burning conditions are ripe. The barbecued sage provides fire with a fire that is enough to devour trees, houses and the entire community. On January 7, 2025, a fire broke out in the canyon outside Malibu. A few hours later, the Eaton fire ignited on a vast National Forest land north of downtown Los Angeles.
That month, eight more fires occurred in Los Angeles County, and firefighters worked hard to put out the biggest fire.
Driven by severe Santa Ana winds and prolonged drought, wildfires collectively scorched 40,000 acres, destroyed more than 15,000 buildings and claimed at least 28 lives. Millions of them are exposed to toxic smoke.
“There are smoke everywhere around us, and there are smoke everywhere,” Kelsey Trainor, an attorney living in Pacific Palisades, told NBC News.
More and more health threats
In the last century, the impact of wildfire smoke on people has changed rapidly. The rapid expansion of housing development into naturally burning landscapes, coupled with climate change, creates the perfect storm. During increasingly extreme wildfires, more and more people are facing dangerous air quality.
According to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Atmospheric Environment, about 44 million people worldwide have unhealthy air quality every year. Another 4 million people were exposed to air quality at least one day, deemed harmful to health.
Researchers estimate that these exposures cause more than 670,000 premature deaths each year, more than one-third of women and young children. Fragile communities, including older people, children, children with health comorbidities, and outdoor workers in agriculture, construction and natural resource management, often face higher smoke exposure rates. Therefore, balancing people and forest health is a forest manager's dilemma.
History of suppression
Fires played a crucial role in forest health throughout the western United States before people were in trouble.
At the right frequency and intensity – two factors become increasingly fluctuating – fire can clear the bushes and make room for new plants and maintain a healthy balance of biodiversity. With the colonization of the United States, firefighting and suppression became the norm, resulting in fuel accumulation on the forest ground.
It was not until recent years that forest management strategies began to shift to using fire as a tool, but there was still a long way to go.
Now one-third of the U.S. homes are built near the Wild City Interface (WUI) or on land prone to wildfires. According to data from the United States Forest Services, the WUI area has grown by 46 million acres in just 20 years. This is the fastest-growing type of land use on the continental United States and has covered areas larger than Washington State. As houses spread to woodland, it is believed that the necessary provision burns are a threat rather than a strategy to prevent a larger wildfire outbreak.
Rather than burning parts of the forest strategically like prescription burns, wild country managers are forced to rely on sparse forests – removing brushes and selecting trees to reduce wildfire feed in forest ports. When the wildfires did break out when they were trying to protect the house, firefighters were forced to quickly suppress the fire instead of letting it run.
In conjunction with climate change, this shift in forest management has led to more severe impacts on the environment and on humans. In a publication in Nature Communications in 2024, researchers discuss the consequences of what they call the “suppression paradox”—by suppressing today’s fires, we make future fires more difficult. Without conventional fires, the forest became denser and more uniform, paving the way for large-scale high-intensity fires that were extremely difficult to suppress.
In recent years, it has been clear that inhibition methods alone are unsustainable. More and more land managers are spinning a more mixed approach, which the authors of the 2024 study called “gradual inhibition.” This includes using some technologies together, including sparse forests, restoration of ecosystems, and restoration of prescribed combustion.
The model of the study suggests that this approach will make forests more resilient to climate change. Although a mix of firefighting methods, including prescribed burns, does not prevent all high-intensity, destructive fires, it will reduce some. These findings were responded to in a 2024 meta-analysis of forest ecology and management and a 2024 study published in fire ecology.
Human health trade-offs
It is understood that logging and fire suppression are lower forest management technologies compared to prescribed combustion, but some public health advocates believe that hazards that harm constitute part of human health needs.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, wildfire smoke is associated with eye, nose and throat irritation, as well as severe health effects, including respiratory distress, heart failure and premature death.
A 2023 meta-analysis published in the journal Neurology found that exposure to high levels of pollution alone can increase people's risk of stroke by 30%, depending on the toxins in the air.
Dr. Ahmad Tubasi, a researcher at the University of Jordan School of Medicine, told NBC News.
Some public health experts worry that prescription burn smoke increases the number of days people are exposed to poor air quality due to fires. The reality may be more complicated.
In a natural sustainability analysis published in 2023,,,,, The researchers found that adding prescribed combustion is the best strategy to reduce wildfire smoke exposure to nearby people when a wildfire outbreak is the same as minimizing additional smoke exposure from prescription combustion, compared to the strategy of only 16,000 hectares of sparse per year in forests per year, while also minimizing additional smoke exposure from prescription combustion. Combining the methods also reduced the wildfire season by about a month.
Some disconnections between health experts and forest experts can be attributed to their working schedule. Smoke exposure can negatively affect human health in just a few days or even hours, which is a consideration for health experts. On the other hand, ecologists and forest managers must consider a broader timeline to prepare the wild for decades to come.
Find a happy medium
Reaching a balance between these schools of thought is not a zero-sum game. There are a number of air quality regulations that limit the quantity and scale of combustion stipulated throughout the United States. Forest managers often perform prescribed burns in areas far from their communities, and in weather conditions, smoke rather than bringing them into people’s lungs. Even these distant burns must be approved by the air quality agency on the day of the burn.
To protect the community from tragic wildfires, managers need to do more prescribed burns where people live. Preparing for this predictable smog surge can help people living in fire communities protect themselves from their harmful health effects.
Improve warning systems and provide people with tools to create smoke-ready spaces can reduce health impacts. An important part of this puzzle is to fix who is responsible for it. Federal agencies have begun.
Officials have developed clear guidelines based on CAIF reports released in 2020, which is responsible for the EPA, the Ministry of Forest Services, the Ministry of the Interior and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is responsible for protecting communities from wildfire smoke while allowing forest managers to use the best forest management technology. The report also highlights the need for institutions to conduct additional research to develop a clearer, shared understanding of the issue.
“These areas of other research include enhanced air quality monitoring capabilities to better characterize the wildlife department’s fire smoke exposure to health research, further understanding of the health effects of wildfire smoke in many seasons, and more fully considering the role of public health actions and interventions in reducing or reducing wildfire smoke exposure.”
However, efforts can be dangerous. On March 12, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin released plans for the agency to deprive air quality protection measures that would make it easier for Wildland managers to do more prescription burns. The Trump administration has also made huge funding and staff cuts for both human health and environmental research.
In 2023, the Biden administration issued a memorandum of understanding for institutions dealing with forestry – the US Department of Agriculture, EPA and the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Collaboration among these agencies includes community engagement to help people prepare for smoke by using EPA instructions to create a “smoke-ready community”.
This includes knowing who constitutes the most vulnerable community before a wildfire or prescription burn, and preparing the community for how to create clean air rooms, knowing its risks, storing drugs, and preparing for potential evacuations.
“The increasing frequency and size of wildfires pose a growing threat to the health of the U.S. public,” said Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the Federal Memorandum Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
prairie He is an environmental health scientist and biosocial scientist at the University of Washington. Kaitlin Sullivan is a freelance journalist. She covers health, science and the environment. This article was produced in collaboration with the Institute of Energy Innovation and Global Change of Aspen. Both organizations are content sharing partners for Yale University’s climate link.
This story is 89% of projectsnow a global news collaboration initiative covering climate.
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