While there have been substantial efforts to quantify the health burden of exposure to PM2.5 from solid fuel use (SFU), the sensitivity of mortality estimates to uncertainties in input parameters has not been quantified. Moreover, previous studies separate mortality from household and ambient air pollution. In this study, we develop a new estimate of mortality attributable to SFU due to the joint exposure from household and ambient PM2.5 pollution and perform a variance‐based sensitivity analysis on mortality attributable to SFU. In the joint exposure calculation, we estimate 2.81 (95% confidence interval: 2.48–3.28) million premature deaths in 2015 attributed to PM2.5 from SFU, which is 580,000 (18%) fewer deaths than would be calculated by summing separate household and ambient mortality calculations. Regarding the sources of uncertainties in these estimates, in China, India, and Latin America, we find that 53–56% of the uncertainty in mortality attributable to SFU is due to uncertainty in the percent of the population using solid fuels and 42–50% from the concentration‐response function. In sub‐Saharan Africa, baseline mortality rate (72%) and the concentration‐response function (33%) dominate the uncertainty space. Conversely, the sum of the variance contributed by ambient and household PM2.5 exposure ranges between 15 and 38% across all regions (the percentages do not sum to 100% as some uncertainty is shared between parameters). Our findings suggest that future studies should focus on more precise quantification of solid fuel use and the concentration‐response relationship to PM2.5, as well as mortality rates in Africa.

Promoting access to clean household cooking energy is an important subject for policy making in low-and middle-income countries, in light of urgent and global efforts to achieve universal energy access by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 7). In 2014, the World Health Organization issued "Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality: Household Fuel Combustion", which recommended a shift to cleaner fuels rather than promotion of technologies that more efficiently combust solid fuels. This study fills an important gap in the literature on transitions to household use of clean cooking energy by reviewing supply chain considerations for clean fuel options in low-and middle-income countries. For the purpose of this study, we consider electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), alcohol fuels, biogas, and compressed biomass pellets burned in high performing gasifier stoves to be clean fuel options. Each of the clean fuels reviewed in this study, as well as the supply of electricity, presents both constraints and opportunities for enhanced production, supply, delivery, and long-term sustainability and scalability in resource-poor settings. These options are reviewed and discussed together with policy and regulatory considerations to help in making these fuel and energy choices available and affordable. Our hope is that researchers, government officials and policy makers, and development agencies and investors will be aided by our comparative analysis of these clean household energy choices.

Residential sector emissions of aerosols, primarily from solid fuels burned for cooking and heating purposes, are high in black carbon, a component that absorbs radiation efficiently across a wideband of wavelengths. Mitigation of residential sector emissions has been suggested as a method to rapidly reduce anthropogenic global warming. This study presents model results from a regional model with coupled chemistry, aerosols, and dynamics over an East Asian domain for January 2014 to investigate the radiative effects of residential sector emissions. Model results are evaluated against surface measurements of particulate matter and remote sensing products, comparing well but with a high aerosol optical depth bias over Sichuan and low single scattering albedo over many locations. We calculate effective radiative forcing of residential sector aerosols at the top of the atmosphere of +1.22 W/m2 over Eastern China, +1.04 W/m2 due to shortwave and +0.18 W/m2 due to longwave forcing. We decompose the shortwave forcing into component parts and find the direct radiative effect is the dominant component (+0.79 W/m2), with a smaller contribution from semidirect effects (+0.54 W/m2) partly countered by negative indirect effects (−0.29 W/m2). The effective radiative forcing varies from 0.20 to 1.97 W/m2 across a reasonable range of black carbon to total carbon emission ratios for the residential sector. Overall, this study shows that mitigation of the residential sector is likely a viable method to locally reduce short‐term atmospheric warming in China, but efforts are needed to reduce uncertainty in composition of residential sector emissions to be confident in this conclusion.

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