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Health Impacts of Invasive Species Through an Altered Natural Environment: Assessing Air Pollution Sinks as a Causal Pathway

Environmental and Resource Economics volume 71, pages 23–43 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

Invasive alien species impact environmental quality by disrupting biodiversity, vegetation cover, and displacing native flora and fauna. This can affect human health outcomes. For example, the invasive emerald ash borer (EAB) has led to the destruction of millions of ash trees, one of the most common tree species in the US. Since trees are an important source of air pollution sinks, EAB-caused ash dieback may affect human health through changes in air quality. The quasi-random nature of EAB detections and consequent changes in various air pollution levels allow us to analyze differences in mortality rates for individuals living in counties where the beetle has been found relative to individuals in contemporaneously beetle-free counties. Results suggest that EAB are associated with lagged increases in pollutant concentrations ranging from 9.2 to 46.2%. A 2SLS fixed effects model indicates that EAB-induced air pollution is associated with increases in rates of cardiovascular mortality of 6.2/year–32.6/year per 100,000 people and increases in respiratory mortality of 1.9/year–3.9/year per 100,000. Impacts are greatest for children and young adults. At its peak impact, EAB-induced air pollution resulted in $4.8–$21.6 billion in annual mortality costs over 2002–2014 in the 24 US states in the study area. This study has important abatement policy implications.

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Fig. 1

Source USDA APHIS

Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Notes

  1. We recognize that it may be possible for wildfires to have similar intermediary health effects, however, wildfires pose two problems when examining the indirect health consequences. First, wildfires are often not a random event (Preisler and Westerling 2007; Juan et al. 2012). Humans can cause a fire, but also wildfire management regimes can impact the location, severity, and probability of a wildfire occurrence. As a result, it would be difficult to develop a robust treatment/control design to test our hypothesis. Second, smoke inhalation from wildfires can have short- and long-term direct health effects (Aditama 2000; Mott et al. 2002). The timing and existence of these direct health effects would then make it very difficult, if not impossible, to tease out the indirect health effects from a loss of trees. For these two reasons, we believe the loss of ash trees from an EAB invasion provides a unique natural experiment that is better than examining the effect of wildfire on the indirect health impacts from a loss of an environmental amenity, trees.

  2. It is important to exploit quasi-experimental settings where treatment is exogenously determined outside of income. And while richer areas might also invest more in pre-treating trees against EAB, EAB treatments are largely ineffective at saving ash (treatments can slow but not stop EAB spread) (Mercader et al. 2011). Nevertheless, we think that both these possibilities provide further justification as to why our approach is superior to cross-sectional approaches where residential sorting might bias results.

  3. Indeed, the provisioning of shade, interception of rainfall, and reductions in storm runoff may be confounding factors. First, let’s consider the impact of rainfall and storm runoff, which, to our knowledge, have not been found to be a mechanism by which trees affect air quality. Our approach specifically isolates the pollutant sink effect of EAB on mortality, ignoring these other effects on water or water quality. Second, we do recognize that the provisioning of shade could potentially affect energy consumption,—i.e., no trees, equals less shade and more dependence on air conditioning or fans. To account for this impact on energy, air quality standards are accounted for in the analysis, which energy companies are likely to stay within the limits of. We also account for time fixed effects, which would account for unseasonably warm summers or times of high energy use.

  4. Similarly, extant work has looked at using forests and trees as carbon sequesters to combat climate change (Bonan 2008; Stavins 1999). The UN program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and the nationally led REDD+ processes seek to reduce forest emissions and enhance carbon stocks in forests. Carbon sequestration by forests also has spillover effects to health, though the focus of this literature is often on climate change.

  5. We do not include lead in the analysis. Data availability on lead concentrations are extremely limited. Furthermore, ash trees do not remove lead from the air, meaning that EAB detection would have no effect on lead levels.

  6. One will notice that we have no data on ash tree coverage or rates of ash dieback. This is because such data are unavailable at the resolution (county) and time scale (annual) we are investigating. The USGS National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides data for vegetation, but not ash-specific coverage. Additionally, NLCD data are collected only once every 5 years. Another potential source is the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis National Program (FIA) which provides a census of forests across the US. However, the FIA has very limited data on urban forests and forests outside of those overseen by the US government. Moreover, FIA data for urban forests is sparse over the time horizon in this analysis. These large data gaps are too substantial for us to use FIA data given that ash are more common in urban (vs. rural) areas. While data on ash coverage would be a welcome addition to this analysis, it does not, in our estimation, invalidate the empirical design given that EAB destruction of ash is thorough and nearly universal once detected in a county. EAB is an exogenous source of quasi-random ash tree loss that planners are largely unable to stop (Herms and McCullough 2014).

  7. An alternative to using all US counties where EAB has or will be detected as treated and control units, respectively, is to perform separate analyses based on geographic location where treated counties are compared to like control counties within some defined geographic area. This would be one additional way to incorporate the possibility of pollution endogeneity based on location. To this end, an alternative specification was additionally explored where models were estimated based on geographic subsets of the data defined by time zones (e.g., Eastern and Central). These results are similar to the results when all EAB ever-detected counties are used.

  8. Specific variables included are a cubic polynomial for maximum temperature, cubic polynomial for minimum temperature, interaction of max. and min. temperature, quadratic polynomial for total precipitation, quadratic polynomial for total snowfall, interaction of total precip. with max. temp., lags of max. and min. temp., interaction of max. temp. with one-period lagged max. temp., and an interaction of max. temp. with one-period lagged min. temp.

  9. Unlike the other pollutants, EAB’s impact on SO2 actually peaks in lag year 11 where pollutant levels are about 60% higher. All results are significant at the 5% level.

  10. Ash dieback will certainly lead to reduced vegetative surface area for atmospheric particles to rest on, especially if environmental planners remove dying or dead ash, causing re-suspension of particles back into the atmosphere. The duration or magnitude of this re-suspension may vary widely. Additional physical evidence outside the scope of this analysis would be required to determine localized re-suspension rates from EAB-infested trees. It is possible that re-suspended particles deposit on other surfaces (e.g., structures, other vegetation, the ground, etc.) in a relatively short period of time. Since our data is at an annual time step, we would be unlikely to pick up such short duration impacts. However, we caveat our finding of no EAB association at the county-year level by noting that it does not necessarily preclude localized, micro-level impacts to air quality or health.

  11. Our treatment of air pollution has been a single-pollutant approach. A growing epidemiology literature calls for use of “multi-pollutant models” to estimate the effects of air pollution and health outcomes (Vedal and Kaufman 2011; Dominici et al. 2010). As a robustness check, we simultaneously estimated the impact of EAB jointly on all gaseous pollutants (CO, O3, NO2, NOx, and SO2) and on mortality outcomes using a full-information maximum likelihood function (3SLS). This model included a full set of five-way pollution concentration interactions. Results are similar to those from the single-pollutant model in Fig. 2.

  12. We also estimated cross-sectional and fixed effects models of the air pollution-mortality relationship using OLS on Eq. (1). Some of these results are counterintuitive (e.g., more pollution, better health), reinforcing use of an IV design. Results of these estimations are available upon request.

  13. Estimated using an $8.82 million (2016$) value of a statistical life (VSL) recommended by the US EPA for analyses that seek to quantify mortality risk reduction benefits regardless of the age, income, or other population characteristics of the affected population.

  14. Based on average total population of 6,719,219 in these areas over 2002–2014 from US Census Bureau estimates.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Geoffrey Donovan (USDA Forest Service), Eyal Frank (Columbia University), participants at the 2016 WEAI AERE meetings, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Mexico, 1915 Roma Ave. NE, MSC 05 3060, Albuquerque, NM, 87131, USA

    Benjamin A. Jones

  2. Department of Economics, Trinity University, Chapman Center Room 415, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX, 78212, USA

    Shana M. McDermott

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  1. Benjamin A. Jones
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Correspondence to Shana M. McDermott.

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Jones, B.A., McDermott, S.M. Health Impacts of Invasive Species Through an Altered Natural Environment: Assessing Air Pollution Sinks as a Causal Pathway. Environ Resource Econ 71, 23–43 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0135-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0135-6

Keywords

  • Air pollutant sinks
  • Ash trees
  • EAB
  • Invasive species
  • Mortality

JEL Classification

  • Q51
  • Q57
  • Q23
  • I18

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