More than 2 billion people worldwide rely on solid fuels—wood, dung, crop residues, or coal—and traditional stoves or open fires for cooking, lighting, and, in colder climates, heating.  Exposure to the emissions caused by burning these fuels is believed to be responsible for a significant share of the global burden of disease.  To achieve wide-spread health improvements, interventions that reduce exposures to indoor air pollution will need to be adopted by large numbers of households in the developing world.  Households can be expected to adopt a new technology, such as an improved stove, if the perceived benefits of adoption are greater than the costs.  While the physical impacts of adopting an improved stove, such as reduced emissions or improved fuel efficiency, can be observed directly, the value in monetary terms to the household of the physical changes is less evident.  Yet it is essential to estimate the monetary values if we are to assess the household-level benefits of potential interventions, compare them to the costs, and thereby understand household incentives to adopt the interventions and identify policies to support adoption.
 
The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach for identifying the benefits to households of implementing indoor air pollution interventions and translating them into a monetary equivalent so that they can be compared to intervention costs.  The monetary benefits of adopting an intervention can be defined as a combination of three terms: (1)  the value the household places on the direct health benefits to children; (2) the value the household places on direct health benefits to adults (mainly women); and (3) the value the household places on health benefits to children generated by better health in adults.  Applying this framework to existing data from developing country studies suggests that the value of the health improvements will exceed the costs for common interventions like improved stoves.  Adopting an intervention to reduce indoor air pollution is also likely to induce a wide range of other household adjustments, such as altering household fuel use, cooking times, other household labor allocations, food and non-food consumption, fuel gathering and agricultural production.  These adjustments are discussed, and priorities for research are presented.
 

Prepared for the USAID/WHO Global Technical Consultation on The Health Impacts of Indoor Air Pollution and Household Energy in Developing Countries May 3-4, 2000 Washington, DC