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A skateboarder passes buildings shrouded in smoke from wildfires in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Wednesday, May 17, 2023. Scenes in Calgary were reminiscent of Seattle last summer and San Francisco in 2020 as wind currents blew smothering wildfire smoke into those population centers, compromising air quality. Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg

Life Health > Life Insurance

Wildfire-Related 'Purple Air' Starting to Get Life Actuaries' Attention

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What You Need to Know

  • Unhealthy, 'purple air' affected about 40 million U.S. residents this week.
  • Wildfires often cause purple air to descend over the West Coast.
  • Researchers suggest that wildfire smoke can have a small but noticeable effect on mortality.

Public health specialists and life insurance actuaries are starting to think about what increased exposure to wildfire smoke could do to the odds of insured people becoming disabled or dying.

Plumes of smoke from wildfires in Canada and elsewhere got U.S. policymakers’ attention this week by putting 40 million people — in an area of the country that includes the Great Lakes area, New York, Philadelphia and Washington — under a cloud of “purple air,” or heavily polluted air.

That pollution spike gave residents on the East Coast a short taste of what residents of California, Oregon and Washington state have often experienced during wildfire outbreaks in recent years.

Historically, insurers have treated wildfires as a concern for issuers of property and casualty insurance, not issuers of life insurance. But, writing three years ago in an article about a big, intense wave of bushfires in Australia, life insurance actuary Rhode Harrington estimated that an intense, weeklong burst of exposure to bushfire smoke could increase the overall death rate by up to about 0.3% and could increase the overall disability rate by up to about 0.1%.

What It Means

Climate change or other factors that increase people’s exposure to wildfire smoke could eventually lead to a modest increase in the cost of life insurance and add to uncertainty of retirement planning clients’ life expectancy.

PM2.5 Dust

One air quality indicator is the amount of dust in the air. Researchers often track exposure to the fine dust made up of grains that are less than 2.5 millionths of a meter wide, or PM2.5 dust.

This week, in the Northeastern U.S. communities affected by the wildfire smoke, PM2.5 levels soared to more than 150 milligrams per cubic meter of air, according to the federal government’s AirNow Air Quality Index website. That was 10 times the typical PM2.5 level.

“Purple air” is air with such a bad Air Quality Index rating that it belongs in one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s purple-colored “unhealthy” or “hazardous” categories.

More Research

Rosana Aguilera and other researchers estimated in a paper published in Nature Communications in 2021 that exposure to California wildfire smoke appears to be 10 times more dangerous than spikes in exposure to other types of dust.

Tingting Ye and colleagues suggested, in a Nature Communications paper published in 2022, that wildfire smoke exposure spikes in Brazil increase the death rate from all causes there by about 3.1% around the time when the smoke exposure spikes occur.

The Congressional Budget Office noted, in a 2022 report, that one team of researchers estimated that the wildfires that swept over the western United States in 2018 caused 3,600 extra deaths. If that estimate is correct, the number of U.S. deaths caused by wildfire smoke in 2018 might have been comparable to the number of U.S. deaths caused by gallbladder disease.

Pictured: Wildfire smoke in Calgary, Alberta. (Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg)


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