The costs and benefits of clean cooking policies in low- and middle-income countries under real-world conditions

Abstract Clean cooking technologies have the potential to deliver tremendous health, environmental, climate, and gender equity benefits. We use the BAR-HAP model to analyze the regional and global costs and benefits of policies to support household-level transitions to cleaner technologies. The analysis provides realistic, evidence-based estimates of the impacts of policy interventions, while remaining conservative about factors such as stove usage rates, subsidy leakage rates, and exposure levels. These conservative assumptions notwithstanding, policies supporting a clean cooking transition would still deliver net benefits of 1.4 trillion USD from 2020–2050 across 120 LMICs; those including some promotion of improved stoves have lower net social benefits. Most monetized benefits are from health – especially mortality – improvements, followed by averted CO2e. Although substantial investment will be needed to realize these benefits, the economic case for scaling up policy action is strong. Identifying effective policies to achieve more exclusive clean fuel use would only increase benefits.