Estimating Co-benefit Health Impacts from transitions to Modern Energy Cooking

By Malcolm Bricknell and Professor Matt Leach (Modern Energy Cooking Services)

Clean cooking can be a powerful intervention for improving health, yet proving those health benefits in a way that stands up to scrutiny has remained surprisingly difficult. While the link between household air pollution and adverse health outcomes is well established, measuring improvements in a way that is credible, scalable, and cost-effective has been a persistent challenge. Data collection can be complex and time-consuming, and existing lower-intensity methods often rely on weak proxies, like self-reported changes in health.

To address this challenge, a team comprising the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group plus colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Irvine, in collaboration with MECS, have developed a three-level framework to estimate health benefits using simplified, scalable methods. These are intended to be layered onto the latest version of the Gold Standard Metered & Measured Energy Cooking Methodology (MMMECD) and similar methodologies using derivatives of this digital usage-based approach. (Access Berkeley Report, Metered Methodology Health Methods, Phase 1 Deliverables)

The proposed framework sets out a progression of approaches. At the first level, projects can infer health benefits from the extent to which polluting cooking is displaced by clean technologies such as LPG, electricity, or ethanol. The second level introduces direct measurement of kitchen air quality (PM2.5), leveraging advances in low-cost sensors to demonstrate reductions in indoor pollution concentrations. The third level goes further still, measuring personal exposure and translating this into estimates of averted disease burden. Each level is designed for integration with digital MRV systems.

This structure allows projects to match the level of evidence they generate with what is feasible – and with what markets require. It recognises that not all projects can support intensive monitoring, but that even simpler approaches can still provide meaningful, credible evidence of impact.

More specifically:

• The first level involves the demonstration of a basic health impact contribution based on the direct monitoring of fuel use and technology adoption. Projects would demonstrate a predetermined minimum displacement of traditional polluting stoves (e.g., three-stone fires, charcoal stoves) with clean technology (e.g., LPG, ethanol, electricity).
• Building upon Level 1, the second level would introduce direct measurements of cooking area pollution (PM2.5 concentrations) using lower-cost sensors. Projects would be required to demonstrate a predetermined minimum reduction in indoor PM2.5 concentrations post-intervention, compared to the pre-intervention or control conditions.
• The third level involves direct measurement of personal exposure to air pollution before and after the cooking transition, and the translation of these potential exposure reductions into averted health burdens using recognised models.

Why does this matter? Because these kinds of approaches could fundamentally change how clean cooking projects are financed. Carbon credits have become extremely important as a source of funding to enable the transition to clean cooking. Cooking projects can often obtain higher carbon credit prices in recognition of their SDG ‘co-benefits’, but current methods for demonstrating the co-benefits can be relatively weak.

Digital technology can play an important role in enabling reporting at a wholly different level to earlier practices, especially where impact measurement can piggyback off the data platform required for carbon credit certification. Demonstrating health improvements as a measurable co-benefit represents an important step toward a more comprehensive and credible accounting of this critical clean cooking impact.

Integrating health-related indicators into digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) systems can also strengthen the credibility of other results-based financing mechanisms, attract new sources of climate and development finance, and improve alignment between carbon markets and global sustainable development and health objectives.

This report is an important first step – but the real test will be in piloting these approaches in real-world projects. That work is now beginning, and we are keen to collaborate with others who want to push this forward.

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AI Disclaimer: ChatGPT was used to refine the wording and flow of the text.

Featured Image Credit: AI created infographic based on prompts by Matthew Leach, 2026.