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 CO2 response. Health impacts owing to changes in ambient particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5) amount to ∼22.5 million premature deaths prevented between 2000 and 2100.