Estimating the Air Quality Co-Benefits of Preventing Deforestation-related Fires

RICARDO MORALES BETANCOURT, Fernando Garcia-Menendez, Amy P. Sullivan, Diego Roberto Rojas-Neisa, Universidad de los Andes

     Abstract Number: 559
     Working Group: Remote and Regional Atmospheric Aerosol

Abstract
The main link between health and deforestation control is the occurrence of fire. In South America, the forest loss process is almost always preceded or mediated by fire. Nearly all fires in the Amazon are linked to deforestation. In turn, landscape fires are the main source of regional air pollutant emissions, significantly deteriorating air quality. The health burden of deforestation-related landscape fires is still understudied. In this work, we used the chemical transport model WRF-Chem to estimate the fraction of ground-level aerosol concentration attributable to deforestation-related fires in South America. We developed a BAU scenario (i.e., uncontrolled deforestation) and completed a year-long simulation with WRF-Chem for the year 2018. This BAU case was evaluated against ground-based BB tracer observations (e.g., levoglucosan and others), and remote sensing products. The modeling domain of 3240 x 3240 km covered the northern half of South America with a horizontal resolution of 9 × 9 km. We accounted for the uncertainty in biomass burning (BB) emissions by using two commonly applied emission inventories (FINN1.5 and GFED4). To further explore the relationships between fires and deforestation practices, we run two additional sensitivity scenarios in which only BB emissions from forests (i.e., those potentially attributable to deforestation) were included, for both FINN and GFED4. Our results show a wide range of estimates of BB emissions from forests across inventories but suggest that these are the dominant source of primary particles and aerosol precursors in the region. Our results also suggest that potentially thousands of deaths could be avoided if BB emissions from forests are suppressed, due to the expected decrease in long-term exposure to PM2.5 resulting from effective deforestation and wildfire control. This work shows that if National Commitments for deforestation control are met, reductions in BB emissions could substantially improve air quality in South America.