Climate policy often calls clean air a co-benefit. But in the case of wildfire smoke, it isn't: the same particles simultaneously warm the planet and damage lungs.
Climate and health are usually joined in policy language: Act on emissions, and you will also get cleaner air, leading to health gains as a welcome secondary return on a climate investment. It is a useful framing, and for most sources it is broadly accurate.
Wildfires break this framing. In the case of landscape fire, the climate damage and the health damage are not two consequences of one activity. They are the same particles, doing both jobs, on the same timescale, in the same plume.
Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires at a scale that is no longer speculative. The 2025 Lancet Countdown recorded some 154,000 deaths attributable to wildfire smoke in 2024 — a record, and roughly a third higher than the average of the previous decade. Nearly two thirds of the countries assessed now show rising exposure to wildfire risk.
The trend line of health impacts is driven less by smoke becoming denser than by more people living where the smoke is. This means that the burden grows even in years when fire activity is unexceptional, and it means the sharpest increases fall in countries with the least capacity to respond. The data shows that low-income countries have seen exposure-driven mortality rise the fastest.
Europe is no longer an observer of this. The 2025 fire season produced the highest annual fire emissions the European Union and the United Kingdom have recorded in more than two decades of monitoring. National health estimates for southern Member States now run into the high hundreds and thousands of smoke-attributable deaths a year, with more economically deprived areas experiencing higher wildfire danger, smoke exposure, and attributable mortality.
Black carbon — soot — is released by incomplete combustion, absorbs sunlight in the atmosphere, and darkens snow and ice where it settles, accelerating melt. It is among the most potent short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) as well as a fine particulate that lodges deep in the lungs and passes into the bloodstream.
This has an unusual policy consequence. Most air pollution control carries a hidden climate penalty: removing sulphate aerosols, which cool, unmasks warming that was already committed. Cutting fire-related black carbon carries no such penalty. The climate benefit and the health benefit point in the same direction and materialise on the same near-term horizon: A single intervention with a single, undivided return.
Air quality law almost everywhere, including in the European Union, treats fine particulate matter as a uniform quantity: a microgram is a microgram, whatever is burned to produce it.
The evidence no longer supports this approach. Wildfire particulate appears to be substantially more harmful per unit mass than particulate from urban and industrial sources — more chemically reactive, more inflammatory, and, in the case of neurological outcomes, apparently far more damaging even at lower concentrations. Toxicological and epidemiological work now converge on this point.
This fact has an uncomfortable implication. Our monitoring frameworks are calibrated for the emissions of the last century while the fastest-growing source of particulate exposure behaves differently from the substance those frameworks were designed around.
Warming lengthens fire seasons and dries fuel. Fire releases carbon and soot, which lead to further warming. In the boreal north, fire emissions are now large enough to call into question whether the region remains a net carbon sink at all, and recent modelling suggests that including fire and permafrost emissions materially shrinks the carbon budget still available for reaching the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.
Therefore, the emissions we treat as an unfortunate natural byproduct are quietly consuming the budget we would need to preserve in order to slow the warming that produces them. At the same time, every turn of the loop delivers more smoke to more people.
In a broad sense, we already know the solutions for addressing this challenge of wildfire and black carbon emissions. Air quality frameworks that recognise source-specific toxicity; emissions monitoring that counts fire-derived black carbon rather than exempting it as natural; fire prevention and land management funded as climate mitigation rather than disaster response; and international support for fire management capacity in the regions carrying the heaviest health burden and holding the fewest resources.
Wildfire smoke does not distinguish between our policy silos, and we need integrated approaches to fight it.
SLYCAN Trust is a non-profit think tank. It has been a registered legal entity in the form of a trust since 2016, and a guarantee limited company since 2019. The entities focus on the thematic areas of climate change, adaptation and resilience, sustainable development, environmental conservation and restoration, social justice, and animal welfare. SLYCAN Trust’s activities include legal and policy research, education and awareness creation, capacity building and training, and implementation of ground level action. SLYCAN Trust aims to facilitate and contribute to multi-stakeholder driven, inclusive and participatory actions for a sustainable and resilient future for all.
Climate policy often calls clean air a co-benefit. But in the case of wildfire smoke, it isn't: the same particles simultaneously warm the planet and damage lungs.
Climate and health are usually joined in policy language: Act on emissions, and you will also get cleaner air, leading to health gains as a welcome secondary return on a climate investment. It is a useful framing, and for most sources it is broadly accurate.
Wildfires break this framing. In the case of landscape fire, the climate damage and the health damage are not two consequences of one activity. They are the same particles, doing both jobs, on the same timescale, in the same plume.
Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires at a scale that is no longer speculative. The 2025 Lancet Countdown recorded some 154,000 deaths attributable to wildfire smoke in 2024 — a record, and roughly a third higher than the average of the previous decade. Nearly two thirds of the countries assessed now show rising exposure to wildfire risk.
The trend line of health impacts is driven less by smoke becoming denser than by more people living where the smoke is. This means that the burden grows even in years when fire activity is unexceptional, and it means the sharpest increases fall in countries with the least capacity to respond. The data shows that low-income countries have seen exposure-driven mortality rise the fastest.
Europe is no longer an observer of this. The 2025 fire season produced the highest annual fire emissions the European Union and the United Kingdom have recorded in more than two decades of monitoring. National health estimates for southern Member States now run into the high hundreds and thousands of smoke-attributable deaths a year, with more economically deprived areas experiencing higher wildfire danger, smoke exposure, and attributable mortality.
Black carbon — soot — is released by incomplete combustion, absorbs sunlight in the atmosphere, and darkens snow and ice where it settles, accelerating melt. It is among the most potent short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) as well as a fine particulate that lodges deep in the lungs and passes into the bloodstream.
This has an unusual policy consequence. Most air pollution control carries a hidden climate penalty: removing sulphate aerosols, which cool, unmasks warming that was already committed. Cutting fire-related black carbon carries no such penalty. The climate benefit and the health benefit point in the same direction and materialise on the same near-term horizon: A single intervention with a single, undivided return.
Air quality law almost everywhere, including in the European Union, treats fine particulate matter as a uniform quantity: a microgram is a microgram, whatever is burned to produce it.
The evidence no longer supports this approach. Wildfire particulate appears to be substantially more harmful per unit mass than particulate from urban and industrial sources — more chemically reactive, more inflammatory, and, in the case of neurological outcomes, apparently far more damaging even at lower concentrations. Toxicological and epidemiological work now converge on this point.
This fact has an uncomfortable implication. Our monitoring frameworks are calibrated for the emissions of the last century while the fastest-growing source of particulate exposure behaves differently from the substance those frameworks were designed around.
Warming lengthens fire seasons and dries fuel. Fire releases carbon and soot, which lead to further warming. In the boreal north, fire emissions are now large enough to call into question whether the region remains a net carbon sink at all, and recent modelling suggests that including fire and permafrost emissions materially shrinks the carbon budget still available for reaching the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.
Therefore, the emissions we treat as an unfortunate natural byproduct are quietly consuming the budget we would need to preserve in order to slow the warming that produces them. At the same time, every turn of the loop delivers more smoke to more people.
In a broad sense, we already know the solutions for addressing this challenge of wildfire and black carbon emissions. Air quality frameworks that recognise source-specific toxicity; emissions monitoring that counts fire-derived black carbon rather than exempting it as natural; fire prevention and land management funded as climate mitigation rather than disaster response; and international support for fire management capacity in the regions carrying the heaviest health burden and holding the fewest resources.
Wildfire smoke does not distinguish between our policy silos, and we need integrated approaches to fight it.
