This is a competitive contract solicitation to support the California Air Resources Board (CARB or Board) research priorities for fiscal year 2021-2022. CARB staff will hold a Pre-Application Workshop on April 8, 2021 for this and related projects. CARB is encouraging proposers to form multidisciplinary teams to fulfill contract requirements. Principle Investigators (PIs) must be affiliated with University of California and California State Universities, however, CARB encourages PIs to recruit non-academic research partners and diversify research efforts and talent.
Extreme fires are a growing threat to public health and safety in California with longer seasons and higher exposures. Smoke from extreme fires can emit large amounts of air pollutants in a short time and travel long distances to affect the health of Californians. In the 2020 fire season, vast areas of the state experienced unhealthful air for days or weeks at a time. Our current knowledge of wildfire smoke health effects is based largely on two different streams of research: 1) PM2.5 effects determined from epidemiological research on the short- and long-term health effects of chronic PM2.5 exposure and 2) recent studies that found increased respiratory and cardiac symptoms in people living near wildfire events. However, there has been insufficient attention to studying the effects of repeated exposures to short but intense levels of wildfire smoke as California residents experienced in the 2020 fire season. Therefore, the objective of this project is to estimate the sub-chronic effects (e.g., respiratory and cardiovascular diseases) of short-term exposures (e.g., hourly or daily variations) over days to weeks to wildfire-specific air pollution and to use this information to help educate communities and mitigate health risks in extreme events like wildfires. While there are recent studies of health effects linked to individual wildfire events, this study is envisioned to be a larger-scale (statewide) and multi-year study that will evaluate respiratory and cardiac symptoms across different events and different durations of smoke exposure in the sub-chronic category. State-of-the-art techniques (e.g., GEOS-Chem) should be applied to model wildfire-specific air pollution concentrations with fine spatial-temporal resolution. The expected health outcomes include (but are not limited to) asthma exacerbations, hospitalizations and emergency department visits for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, although other health effects such as total hospitalizations and emergency department visits and adverse birth outcomes are possible. The study should specifically include impacts in priority communities and populations (e.g., children, elderly populations, pregnant women, different racial and ethnic groups and those living in poverty). It is preferable for the study to consider both urban and rural locations, and to also include tribal communities. Updated estimates of health effects of sub-chronic exposure to wildfires will better inform CARB’s analysis of the health burdens from extreme events like wildfires which negatively impact public health and degrade quality of life in California.
Sign Up 
