The costs and benefits of clean cooking policies in low- and middle-income countries under real-world conditions

Abstract

Clean cooking technologies have the potential to deliver tremendous health, environmental, climate, and gender equity benefits. We use the BAR-HAP model to analyze the regional and global costs and benefits of policies to support household-level transitions to cleaner technologies. The analysis provides realistic, evidence-based estimates of the impacts of policy interventions, while remaining conservative about factors such as stove usage rates, subsidy leakage rates, and exposure levels. These conservative assumptions notwithstanding, policies supporting a clean cooking transition would still deliver net benefits of 1.4 trillion USD from 2020–2050 across 120 LMICs; those including some promotion of improved stoves have lower net social benefits. Most monetized benefits are from health – especially mortality – improvements, followed by averted CO2e. Although substantial investment will be needed to realize these benefits, the economic case for scaling up policy action is strong. Identifying effective policies to achieve more exclusive clean fuel use would only increase benefits.

Testing the effectiveness of household fuel conservation strategies: Policy implications for increasing the affordability of exclusive clean cooking

“…Some research has suggested that strategies such as soaking beans or using energy efficient pots can reduce cooking times, but there is no evidence on the specific quantity of fuel savings that such behaviors could achieve ( Munthali et al, 2022 ; Nabukwangwa et al, 2023 ). Enhancing affordability and use of clean fuels through energy conservation measures would not only benefit households through time savings and potential economic and health impacts ( Jeuland et al, 2023 ), but would also contribute to reducing negative environmental impacts of biomass use, such as deforestation and climate change ( Goldemberg et al, 2018 ). A recent modeling analysis found that full transitions to LPG and/or electricity for cooking in 77 LMICs would nearly eliminate annual emissions of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) and carbon monoxide (CO), significantly reduce well-mixed greenhouse gas emissions, and nearly eliminate emissions of the strongest short-lived climate forcing pollutants compared to a business-as-usual scenario ( Floess et al, 2023 ).…”