Transient climate and ambient health impacts due to national solid fuel cookstove emissions

Abstract

Residential solid fuel use contributes to degraded indoor and ambient air quality and may affect global surface temperature. However, the potential for national-scale cookstove intervention programs to mitigate the latter issues is not yet well known, owing to the spatial heterogeneity of aerosol emissions and impacts, along with coemitted species. Here we use a combination of atmospheric modeling, remote sensing, and adjoint sensitivity analysis to individually evaluate consequences of a 20-y linear phase-out of cookstove emissions in each country with greater than 5% of the population using solid fuel for cooking. Emissions reductions in China, India, and Ethiopia contribute to the largest global surface temperature change in 2050 [combined impact of −37 mK (11 mK to −85 mK)], whereas interventions in countries less commonly targeted for cookstove mitigation such as Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have the largest per cookstove climate benefits. Abatement in China, India, and Bangladesh contributes to the largest reduction of premature deaths from ambient air pollution, preventing 198,000 (102,000-204,000) of the 260,000 (137,000-268,000) global annual avoided deaths in 2050, whereas again emissions in Ukraine and Azerbaijan have the largest per cookstove impacts, along with Romania. Global cookstove emissions abatement results in an average surface temperature cooling of −77 mK (20 mK to −278 mK) in 2050, which increases to −118 mK (−11 mK to −335 mK) by 2100 due to delayed CO 2 response. Health impacts owing to changes in ambient particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 µm or less (PM 2.5 ) amount to ∼22.5 million premature deaths prevented between 2000 and 2100.aerosols | climate | human health | cookstoves | atmospheric modeling G lobally over 3 billion people presently use solid fuel for meal preparation (1). The extent of this activity and the associated air quality pollutant emissions have led to numerous cookstove intervention studies and programs, such as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves work to implement 60 million clean cookstoves by 2017 (cleancookstoves.org/about/news/11-20-2014-market-enabling-roadmap-phase-2-2015-2017.html). A primary goal of these efforts is to improve indoor air quality, estimated to cause ∼4.3 million premature deaths annually, along with enhancing livelihood of woman and children via reprieval from fuel collection and other solid fuel cookingrelated tasks (2).The magnitude of the emissions of aerosols, aerosol precursors, and greenhouse gases from solid fuel use has also motivated studies of the impact of these emissions on climate and ambient air quality. An estimated 370,000-500,000 global premature deaths in adults occur annually owing to ambient exposure to fine particulate matter associated with residential cookstoves (3-5), and there are as many as 1.0 million global annual premature deaths of adults and children under the age of 5 y from combined residential and commercial energy generation (which includes solid fuel use for cooking) (6). Thi...

Source influence on emission pathways and ambient PM<sub>2.5</sub> pollution over India (2015–2050)

“…Prior global analyses have also found evidence for the importance of residential biomass fuel use in India (e.g. Verma et al, 2008Verma et al, , 2011Philip et al, 2014b;Lelieveld et al, 2015;Silva et al, 2016;Lacey et al, 2017). The dominance of residential biomass fuel emissions is an important underlying cause for the regional nature of air pollution in India because of the widely dispersed and distributed nature of this uncontrolled source.…”

The Firepower Sweep Test: A novel approach to cookstove laboratory testing

“…3 Additionally, particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions from cookstoves have been linked to anthropogenic climate forcing and reduced outdoor air quality. [4][5][6][7][8] Over the past several decades, "improved" cookstoves have been engineered to increase heat transfer efficiency and lower emissions.…”

“… 5 ,. BC, and CO emissions factors; however, the correlation varied in strength and directionality across stove-fuel combinations (eg, for PM 2.5 , Spearman's rho ranged from −0.15 to 0.92).…”

Source influence on emission pathways and ambient PM<sub>2.5</sub> pollution over India (2015–2050)

“…Prior global analyses have also found evidence for the importance of residential biomass fuel use in India (e.g. Verma et al 2008;Philip et al, 2014b;Lelieveld et al 2015;Silva et al, 2016;Lacey et al, 2017). The dominance of residential biomass fuel emissions is an important underlying cause for the regional nature of air pollution in India, because of the widely dispersed and distributed nature of this uncontrolled source.…”