You can track health impacts with HAPIT, the Household Air Pollution Intervention Tool . Use that directly instead of the assuming clean cookstoves eliminate the disease burden, which is far from the truth.
Clean cookstoves have a really high bar to clear to reduce the disease burden for several reasons: 1) Exposure is non-linear. The relative risk of dropping from 400 ug/m3 to 175 ug/m3 PM exposure is the same as going from 100 ug/m3 to 50 ug/m3. To reduce the disease burden to <1.5 requires exposure <50 PM ug/m3, which is very difficult for any biomass stove to accomplish. 2) For the disease burden to be reduced, nearly all stoves in a locality need to be replaced, otherwise the outdoor air will still be above the exposure threshold. 3) Stoves need to be used, used correctly, and maintained. The education and cultural habits to do this are very difficult to embed in a population.
For these reasons, clean cookstoves have historically been largely unsuccessful at reducing the disease burden. They are improving. See the “2019 Climate Action and Clean Cooking Co-benefits workshop presentations and discussions” presentation by the Clean Cooking Alliance. This group is setting standards and tiers for clean cookstoves to rank them on performance and targeting intervention locations based on many factors to determine where cookstoves will be most successful.
Even with optimistic assumptions of stove performance and uptake from HAPIT, it is likely that cookstoves will remain at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the best GiveWell recommended interventions for some time.
You can track health impacts with HAPIT, the Household Air Pollution Intervention Tool . Use that directly instead of the assuming clean cookstoves eliminate the disease burden, which is far from the truth.
Clean cookstoves have a really high bar to clear to reduce the disease burden for several reasons:
1) Exposure is non-linear. The relative risk of dropping from 400 ug/m3 to 175 ug/m3 PM exposure is the same as going from 100 ug/m3 to 50 ug/m3. To reduce the disease burden to <1.5 requires exposure <50 PM ug/m3, which is very difficult for any biomass stove to accomplish.
2) For the disease burden to be reduced, nearly all stoves in a locality need to be replaced, otherwise the outdoor air will still be above the exposure threshold.
3) Stoves need to be used, used correctly, and maintained. The education and cultural habits to do this are very difficult to embed in a population.
For these reasons, clean cookstoves have historically been largely unsuccessful at reducing the disease burden. They are improving. See the “2019 Climate Action and Clean Cooking Co-benefits workshop presentations and discussions” presentation by the Clean Cooking Alliance. This group is setting standards and tiers for clean cookstoves to rank them on performance and targeting intervention locations based on many factors to determine where cookstoves will be most successful.
Even with optimistic assumptions of stove performance and uptake from HAPIT, it is likely that cookstoves will remain at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the best GiveWell recommended interventions for some time.
[Edit: fixed some spelling errors]