Health & environment
Household Air Pollution
Definition
Household air pollution is contamination of indoor and near-home air caused primarily by the incomplete combustion of solid fuels (wood, charcoal, dung, crop waste, coal) and kerosene in open fires and inefficient stoves for cooking, heating, and lighting. It emits fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other toxic pollutants; WHO attributes an estimated 2.9 million deaths in 2021 to household air pollution, with women and children bearing the greatest burden.
References
definition and health toll
technical definition
Overview
What it means
Around 2. 1 billion people still cook with polluting fuels, and indoor smoke concentrations can exceed WHO guidelines many times over. The issue links health (stroke, heart disease, COPD, lung cancer, childhood pneumonia), gender (women do most cooking and fuel collection), climate (black carbon is a potent short-lived climate pollutant), and environment (fuelwood pressure degrades forests).
Clean cooking means fuels and stoves meeting WHO guideline emission levels.
How it is used
The term anchors SDG 7 clean-cooking tracking, public-health burden estimates, and clean-stove programme design.
Why it matters
It is one of the world's largest — and most solvable — environmental health risks, sitting exactly where poverty, gender, and climate meet.