[Stoves] health impact?

[Marc-Antoine Pare]

Hi everyone,

A big confession: having tinkered with stoves for years, I never actually
looked into the numbers of stove health impacts. I'm trying to fix that,
and I hope you can help!

I mean, yes, I can wave my hands about PM and CO and four million deaths!

But how many deaths (or DALYs) do you avert per stove? Or per 10,000
stoves? Or per 100,000,000?

I thought it would be an easy question to answer, but it's turning out to
be quite tricky to even ballpark.

Here is one interesting source. This is from the very recent webinar on
Kirk Smith's HAPIT tool.

http://www.cleancookstoves.org/resources_files/hapit-results-rwanda.pdf

This report considers 25,000 households.
If you provide all of those households a rocket stove, you save only 0.75
lives per year.

If you take the GACC's target 100,000,000 households, that would mean

0.75/25000*100000000 = *3,000 lives saved* worldwide annually.

What am I missing there? This seems so small.

Some speculation:

Kirk Smith mentions in the HAPIT webinar that even a small amount of PM2.5
is still harmful. Perhaps biomass stoves just don't get the number low
enough?

I think this would fit with the chart in the linked PDF that shows that
stoves only reduce deaths by <5% for indoor air pollution. A few times in
the HAPIT webinar, they mention "a lot of lives are still left on the
table."

This also seems to agree with something I found in Christian L'Orange's
dissertation:
http://digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNDYyOTQ=.pdf

Figure 33 shows that Envirofit G3300 stoves only have a 3% (or so) impact
on "Adjusted Relative Risk" (of death)


Please do not worry about hurting my feelings in correcting these numbers.
Am I thinking about this the wrong way around? Have I punched the numbers
in incorrectly?

Also, I would be very interested to read more good papers on health impacts
for stoves. It is all really quite interesting work. I feel bad that I
didn't look at it sooner.

Best,

Marc Paré
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