Clean cooking and the SDGs: Integrated analytical approaches to guide energy interventions for health and environment goals

Abstract

Development and implementation of clean cooking technology for households in low and middle income countries (LMICs) offer enormous promise to advance at least five Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 3. Good health and well-being; 5. Gender equality; 7. Affordable and clean energy; 13. Climate action; 15. Life on land. Programs are being implemented around the world to introduce alternative cooking technologies, and we are well on the way to achieving the goal set by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to reach 100 million homes with cleaner and more efficient cooking methods by 2020. Despite evidence that household air pollution (HAP) from solid fuel combustion is responsible for 3-4 million early deaths per year, many cookstove programs are motivated and/or financed by climate change mitigation schemes and deploy alternative stoves that use solid fuels such as wood and charcoal. However, recent studies have demonstrated that improved biomass-burning stoves typically only incrementally improve air quality and yield modest or minimal health benefits. Likewise, their contributions to climate change mitigation and other SDGs may be limited. Evidence indicates that cleaner fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), ethanol and biogas, offer greater potential benefits not only to health, but also greater progress towards climate goals and other relevant SDGs. We present a modeled estimate of these potential gains for a diverse group of 40 LMICs. Our model suggests that cookstove programs using LPG stoves and fuel will yield greater reductions in both Disability Adjusted Life Years and Global Warming Commitment in these countries than those using improved biomass stoves. Cost and infrastructure requirements for clean fuels such as LPG are widely recognized constraints. In view of these constraints we present an analytical method to simultaneously consider health and climate needs at the national level for the same 40 countries in the context of estimated LPG expansion potentials. Comparative analyses integrating priorities across SDGs at the national and regional levels may guide more practical and effective household energy development choices going forward.

Fig. 1

Averted Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) and Global Warming Commitment (GWC) in each of 40 countries for three stove intervention scenarios. a) Boxplots of averted DALYs. b) Boxplots of averted GWC for the same scenarios, stove types and countries. Upper and lower hinges of each boxplot represent the 25th and 75th percentile, respectively; whisker extent comprises values up to 1.5× the interquartile range away from each hinge; dots represent values farther than 1.5× away.

Fig. 2

Annual LPG consumption by households for the years 1990–2015, in kg per capita, for 40 countries. Source: United Nations Energy Statistics Database (United Nations Statistics Division, 2017). Countries not listed in graph, in descending order of LPG consumption in 2014, by World Bank region – Africa: Sudan, Burkina Faso, Swaziland, Kenya, Cameroon, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Benin, Togo, Zimbabwe, Niger, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, Uganda, Nigeria, Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia. South Asia: Pakistan, Bangladesh. E. Asia/Pacific: Solomon Islands, Myanmar. L. Amer/Carib: Haiti.

Fig. 3

Rank of HAP-related disease burden at the national scale versus efNRB for 40 countries. Health impact is the national rank of HAP relative to other risk factors (GBD 2013 Risk Factors Collaborators, 2015). efNRB is a measure of, among other things, unsustainable wood fuel use (Bailis et al., 2015). Color represents quartiles of the LPG expansion index. Lines drawn at median value for efNRB (vertical line) and below the midpoint for HAP rank (horizontal line) to separate countries for which HAP is one of the top five risk factors nationally (vs. of rank 6 to 10). Countries in the upper right quadrant (B) are those for which HAP is among the greatest risk factors for disease and have the most unsustainable supply of fuel wood for cooking.