Household Air Pollution
Cooking on solid fuel kills millions, almost entirely women and children.
Severity score
60.3
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Improving
What this is
More than two billion people cook with wood, charcoal, dung or coal in poorly ventilated homes. The resulting smoke causes pneumonia, stroke, heart disease and lung cancer. Clean cooking transitions are cheap relative to the harm and remain badly underfunded.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
70Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
90People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
40Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
44Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
22Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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