Casey Wichman, Associate Professor, Georgia Tech School of Economics.
Wildfires in the United States are getting bigger and the season is getting longer, fueled by hotter and drier weather from climate change. Even when fires are hundreds of miles away, the wildfire smoke can still harm people's health and create economic costs through air pollution, said Casey Wichman, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Economics.
The Air Quality Index (AQI) measures how clean or polluted the air is. A healthy AQI is between zero and 50, but when wildfire smoke blows in and settles over cities, the AQI can reach levels of 500 or more. Poor air quality changes where and how people spend their time and money, reduces productivity (even for those working indoors), and increases healthcare costs.
“Environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act dramatically improved our air quality over the past 40 years, but as wildfire season becomes the new normal, wildfire smoke is eroding those gains,” Wichman said. According to recent research, wildfire smoke has erased about a quarter of the progress made over previous decades, and more than half in many western states.
