Canadian Wildfires Impacted Health of Residents Hundreds of Miles Away
This summer's record-setting wildfires in Canada caused unhealthy air quality in New York City and increased the amount of asthma-related emergency room visits, a new Yale study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found.
Previous studies on wildfire have mostly focused on the impact of populations residing nearby. The Yale study, co-authored by YSE’s Michelle Bell, Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health, found that emergency department visits in New York City related to asthma syndrome increased by nearly 44% during a three-day wildfire smoke wave from the Canadian fires that were hundreds of miles away. As wildfires become more frequent and larger in recent years as a result of a warming climate, public health officials should develop early warning systems to alert the public to wildfire smoke events and provide guidance to protect vulnerable populations, the authors recommend.
“The air quality impacts of wildfires are widespread, as are the subsequent public health burdens,” Bell said in a statement to CT Pubilc Radio.
The study was led by Kai Chen, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), Yiqun Ma, a doctoral student at YSPH, and Wan Yang, of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Michelle Bell
Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health
More News in Brief
Fenichel Paper Honored for Enduring Impact on Epidemic Modeling
Eli Fenichel, the Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics, and co-authors have been awarded the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s 2025 Paper of Enduring Quality Award for their 2011 PNAS paper on integrating human behavior into models of infectious disease. The study laid key foundations for interdisciplinary research, bridging economics and epidemiology—an approach that proved critical during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I saw a lot of epidemiologists and economists recommending it to each other to figure out how to collaborate on COVID-19 research,” Fenichel said. “I think it set a benchmark for interdisciplinary research on epidemics.”
The award will be presented at the AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, on July 28.
Eli Fenichel
Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics
Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture-related Nonprofit Wins Global Carbon Removal Prize
Mati Carbon, an environmental nonprofit that builds on enhanced rock weathering research by scientists at the Yale School of the Environment and Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture (YCNCC), won the $50 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal international competition for pioneering a crushed-rock solution that pulls carbon from the air and restores farmland.
Noah Planavsky, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, who is a faculty member at YCNCC and head of Mati Carbon’s scientific advisory board, developed methods to track carbon fluxes that the nonprofit used in pilot programs concentrated on small farms in the Global South. More than 1,300 groups from 88 countries took part in the competition, which required teams to create and demonstrate a system for pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere or oceans and durably sequester it.
Part of a suite of natural carbon solutions, enhanced rock weathering has been a focus of research by Peter Raymond, the Oastler Professor of Biogeochemistry at YSE, who will become director of YCNCC on June 30, and James Saiers, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Hydrology, who also serves on YCNCC’s leadership.
All Communication Is Local
As local governments increasingly address the need to build climate resiliency and adapt effective climate mitigation strategies, it is vital that they develop and implement effective communication plans. However, climate communication has not always been a priority, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC). A discussion hosted by YPCCC on April 15, 2025, explored effective communication strategies being employed by municipal communications officials around the country. The key, the officials said, is to embed communications at the beginning of an initiative and make climate mitigation efforts relevant to the daily lives of community members by connecting the initiatives to efficient and cheaper energy bills, job creation, and healthier air.
“Instead of being conceptual and abstract about decarbonization, tell a story about actual people who are making their house efficient and saving money. These kinds of stories consistently connect with people across the political spectrum and across levels of understanding and engagement on climate change,” said Julia Trezona Peek, chief strategy and partnership officer at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
Credit: Denver Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency