Climate and health impacts of the shift from traditional solid cookstove fuels to modern energy sources

Abstract:

Globally, 2.8 million people use solid fuels for meal preparation. As regions in which solid fuel cooking is prevalent become more industrialized, this number will decrease leading to commensurate changes in greenhouse gas, aerosol and aerosol precursor emissions from the residential sector. Here we explore the impacts of this shift from traditional solid fuel use to equivalent energy sources from modern power generation on climate change and exposure to ambient air pollution. We use sensitivities calculated with the GEOS-Chem adjoint model, which allows us to estimate the climate and health impacts due to changes in atmospheric composition from grid-scale shifts in energy usage. Various scenarios for alternative energy generation sources are considered. Climate impacts are reported as changes in global averaged surface temperature through the use of absolute regional temperature potentials and health impacts are reported as changes in premature deaths calculated using changes in population-weighted PM_2.5 concentrations combined with integrated exposure response functions. Global model PM_2.5 surface concentrations are downscaled to improve exposure estimates through application of remotely sensed aerosol optical depth measurements. Our assessment of the impacts of fuel switching allows for estimates of upper and lower bounds, for both climate and health impacts, at the global and national scale. Baseline calculations using these methods estimate impacts of approximately 0.22 K warming and 217,000 premature deaths caused by changes in ambient air quality due to present day cookstove emissions which represents the base case for these comparisons. Overall, the results of this study provide important information to both individual country’s governments and non-governmental organizations that are targeting energy infrastructure improvements.