The Costs and Benefits of Clean Cooking Policies in Low- and Middle-Income Countries Under Real-World Conditions

Clean cooking technologies have the potential to deliver substantial health, environmental, climate, and gender equity benefits. We use the BAR-HAP model to conduct the first global analysis of the regional and global costs and benefits of several subsidy and financing policies supporting household transitions to cleaner technologies. The analysis provides evidence-based estimates of these interventions' impacts, while remaining conservative about factors such as stove usage, subsidy leakage, and exposure levels, for which there remains considerable uncertainty. These conservative assumptions notwithstanding, we show that policies supporting a clean cooking transition would deliver net benefits of 1.4 trillion USD from 2020 to 2050 across 120 LMICs; the promotion of improved-efficiency biomass stoves alongside fully clean technologies yields lower net social benefits. Most monetized benefits are from health—especially mortality—improvements, followed by averted CO2e. Although considerable investment will be needed to realize these benefits, the economic case for scaling up policy action is strong. Moreover, because the effectiveness of cooking transition policies is currently low, research and innovation on incentive designs to achieve more exclusive clean fuel use is sorely needed.