SScientists are beginning to calculate the health costs of heating our homes with wood. A studyin Canberra, Australia, has found that deaths from daily exposure to wood-burning stove smoke are comparable to those during the unprecedented ‘black summer’ bushfires of 2019/2020.
Prof. Sotiris Vardoulakis, part of the research team and director of Healthy Environments and Lives (Cured) National Research Network described winter in the city: “When I take my two boys to play basketball outside in the winter, or when we walk the dog before dinner, there is always a smell of wood smoke in the air.”
Vardoulakis and his team found that wood heating caused up to a quarter of particulate pollution in Canberra. Combining this information on the health damage caused by air pollution, they estimated that between 17 and 63 deaths were attributed to wood smoke each year in the Australian Capital Territory, which has a population of approximately 450,000.
This shortening of life means an annual loss of A$92 million to A$333 million (£48 million to £173 million) to Australian society. The health impacts of these regular winter fires were comparable to smoke-related deaths during the ‘black summer’ bushfires of 2019-2020.
Vardoulakis said: “Canberra suffers from winter pollution, largely due to wood burning stoves. There are many complaints from families with asthma, but also from people without chronic health problems. They feel hopeless. They cannot open their windows in the winter and cannot spend time outdoors because of the wood smoke.
“The most effective way to reduce community exposure to smoke is to not allow new wood-burning stove installations and phase out existing units. These findings are transferable to other residential areas, where wood burning takes place in the colder months of the year.”
Separate research has estimated that 284 Londoners die prematurely every year due to outdoor air pollution from solid fuel heating. In Greece, many people switched from oil to wood heating during the country’s financial crisis in the winter of 2012-2013. An investigation in Thessaloniki approximately 200 additional deaths occurred due to the resulting increase in air pollution.
Measurements in homes, including in Great Britain, show that stoves and fireplaces increase indoor particle pollution. This contributes to pollution from other sources, including cooking and tobacco smoking, but is less researched compared to outdoor exposure.
A recent one survey among 50,000 women in the US, people who used wood heating were found to have a 43% greater risk of lung cancer compared to those who did not. Increased cognitive impairment, a common symptom of dementia, has also been found in people using solid fuel heating in several countries, including China And Ireland.
To understand the full extent of these indoor impacts, two researchers from the University of Lisbon estimated how much heating a home with a wood stove or fireplace shortens the lives of its residents.
Dr. Nuno Martins explained the reason their research: “The original idea came from hearing a podcast with Guardian columnist George Monbiot as a guest. We looked into it more deeply and found that there wasn’t much data on the amount of particulate pollution entering homes from wood-burning equipment.”
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Martins and his team started by measuring air pollution from stoves and fireplaces in a small number of homes. This data was used in computer simulations of three houses in north-west Europe: in Birmingham, Groningen and Copenhagen, and combined with data on the health effects of outdoor air pollution.
Heating a fireplace in the living room for four hours each winter evening is estimated to shorten the resident’s life expectancy by one to 1.6 years. Using a heater can shorten overall life expectancy by up to six months.
This comes with important caveats. Indoor and outdoor air pollution has different sources; chemical composition and exposure. Less is known about calculating the impact of the air pollution we breathe in our homes, but the research could help scientists understand the estimated extent of health impacts on people with stoves and fireplaces, as well as possible solutions.
Martins said: “The key message is that open fires should be avoided. An improvement would be to replace them with closed wood-burning stoves, or ideally to replace the wood-burning stoves completely.”
