Wildfire smoke's 24,000 hidden deaths a year

We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wildfire smoke — specifically, the PM2.5 particulate matter in it — contributed to roughly 24,000 deaths per year in the contiguous US between 2006 and 2020. Concerningly, the authors find no evidence of a “safe” threshold — indicating that chronic exposure is risky even at low levels. Combined with growing evidence that proactive fuel management significantly reduces the severity of subsequent wildfires (Davis et al. 2024 found 62–72% reductions in severity for treatments involving prescribed burns), this makes an even stronger case for streamlining the regulatory requirements that slow down forest management.