Bushfires, Human Health Economics, and Pyrogeography

Bushfires (landscape fires) are a key Earth system process that affects humans and our societies and economies. In a recent article, we explored the coupling of humans to landscape fire through the lens of human health impacts of bushfire smoke. We noted that such an approach demands recognition of the indirect impacts and costs of bushfires that cannot be captured by simplistic proxies such as deaths directly attributable to a fire front. Evaluation of direct and indirect economic costs of bushfire disasters, and bushfire fire management remains a poorly developed research frontier that demands collaboration of expertise from a broad cross-section of fields that often have limited experience of collaborating together. The need for such synthetic thinking about fire's place on Earth has spawned the discipline of pyrogeography.