Over one million people may die from wildfire smoke by 2050. Am I one of them?

I think a lot about fires. It’s hard not to when the sky is ablaze and your bedroom smells like barbecue – when your friends lose their houses, your Facebook is filled with rebuilding fundraisers,  and the flames upend your city’s livelihood.

My personal experience with fires comes from growing up in Southern California, where drought and fires are frequent disasters. As a child, during the worst of the dry season, my community was asked to limit our showers to a five-minute maximum. Once, at summer camp, I even managed to get mine down to a minute and a half. 

These short showers were a nuisance at most, but the real problem came when these arid conditions culminated in wildfires—frequent, destructive fires. Most of the time, these blazes barely made it over the hills, and the only evidence was faint traces of daytime smoke and aerial footage from the local weather helicopter.

But in the last five years, flames have been creeping closer to home in Los Angeles. In 2020, the Bobcat fire began after a powerline ignited a nearby tree. The fire-favorable conditions led to destruction on a massive scale—six injuries and over 114,000 acres burned. This year has brought fiery damage on a scale I find difficult to conceive. The recent Eaton Fire in January 2025 destroyed 14,000 acres and killed 19 people, leaving some of my high school classmates and teachers without a home. Eleven months later, my community is still rebuilding. Of course, the houses will stand again, and the land, with time, will also return. But, the silent killer—the traces of paints, batteries, and plastics that all went up in flames—will remain invisibly surrounding us for many years to come. I can’t help but wonder, what is its toll?

I started diving into wildfire research and came across a Nature preprint outlining the potential health outcomes of predicted wildfires. I was shocked to learn that the current estimate is around 71,000 excess deaths per year, amounting to roughly 1.9 million deaths between 2026 and 2050. 

The motivation for the study comes at a time when wildfire activity has significantly increased in the US. A primary concern is the production of toxic wildfire smoke and delicate particulate matter (PM2.5), which, due to its small size, is more likely to enter deeper, narrower airways within our lungs. Long-term exposure to PM2.5 has been associated with asthma attacks, respiratory diseases, and premature mortality. As frequent joggers, my family and I were forced to give up our weekly outdoor runs for fear of inhaling excessive particulate matter and smoke. Although specialized face masks or air filters can remove these airborne particles from inside, given their size, PM2.5 can still enter through cracks under doors, windows, or through building structures.

With air pollution already harming millions, understanding the potential human toll of these wildfires has become increasingly urgent. In the Nature study, researchers used machine learning models to predict wildfire emissions from observational data from the last 20 years in the US. They leveraged satellite data to estimate PM2.5 concentrations and predict wind movement as well as used county-level data to assess the effects on annual mortality rates.

Such research is crucial because it highlights the high societal costs of climate change, which are paramount for informed policy-making. We know that human activity is driving environmental changes, which in turn have immediate impacts on our health.  This is not a novel finding–a BMJ study published in 2023 estimated that 8.79 million excess deaths are caused annually due to fossil fuel-related emissions. Climate change and wildfires are also major factors driving human migration after disasters.

As we grapple with the realities of wildfires and their health impacts, we must consider the potential mortality burden and what it could mean for our communities. This knowledge is essential not only for those directly affected but for understanding the broader challenges we face in a warming world. For those of us living in the fire’s path, the question feels personal: Will I be one of the million? Will my loved ones be among them? 

About the Author 

Michelle So is an undergraduate at Yale majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Global Health Studies. She believes in the power of narrative storytelling in climate advocacy and medicine, and contributes to the Yale Daily News as a Sci-Tech writer and edits for the Scientific Magazine and the Global Health Review.

Michelle is a research assistant in the Post Lab of aquatic ecology and volunteers for the Living History Project, where she documents the stories of terminal patients. She became interested in Planetary Health after attending the Johns Hopkins Global Health Leaders Conference and learning about climate change’s impact on human lifespan.

Through her writing, she hopes to collaborate with the Planetary Health Alliance to advocate for healthcare equity and environmental justice.