×F3. Modelling the environmental and public health risks of current and future wildfires in the Asia-Pacific region

Fire is a global phenomenon influencing ecosystem patterns, carbon stocks and fluxes, and atmospheric composition, contributing to local and regional air pollution with substantial health effects. Uncontrollable and extreme wildfires exacerbate climate change, contributing significant greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, and have substantial impacts on public health including birth-outcomes, cardiorespiratory disease and neurodevelopment. Increasingly detailed observational data of different aspects of fire regimes have opened opportunities for improving our understanding of fire drivers and impacts from local to global scales. Atmospheric conditions such as moisture strongly determine the probability of fire occurrence, but vegetation properties and human land management activities are widely recognised as important factors. A new UNEP report, Spreading like Wildfire, finds that climate change and land-use change are making wildfires worse and anticipates a global increase of extreme fires even in areas previously unaffected. In most cases, emissions from fire activity have substantial transboundary effects as pollution may travel long distances and thus affect public health far from the source, requiring modelling to better understand the relationships between sources and receptors.

We welcome contributions with a modelling and simulation focus on topics related to air pollution and human health impacts, particularly from wildfire and preventive activities. In addition, we invite submissions aiming to improve our understanding and capabilities of modelling interactions between fire, land surface, and air pollution. Contributions may cover a wide range of topics, including data integration methods related to remote sensing, in situ observations, Health Impact Assessments and local-to-regional scale modelling. We are especially interested in studies focusing on the importance of climate, land-use, atmospheric and vegetative conditions on fire occurrence across scales, the impacts of fire on properties of land and atmosphere, or feedbacks between fire, land and atmosphere and studies focusing on impacts of fires on public health.

Key topics: Wildfires, Air pollution, Public health