College of Science & Engineering

Statistician Dr Oliver Stoner developed new estimates of polluting household energy use during an 18-month project with the World Health Organization (WHO), funded by the EPSRC IAA. The resulting new estimates are published in Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report and beyond, to inform national policies around the world.

The issue

People around the world use polluting fuels to cook and heat their homes, leading to illnesses and millions of deaths per year. Target 7.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals 7 (SDG7), agreed by all United Nations member states, calls for affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030. Strong policies to reduce the use of polluting fuels can improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. For example, in Indonesia, a national push to transition from kerosene to LPG brought clean cooking to almost 150 million people. However, due to limited data, including a lack of monitoring global data on polluting heating, the full extent of the use of polluting household energy worldwide is unknown.

The response

Funded by the IAA, Dr Oliver Stoner, a lecturer in Statistics, undertook an 18-month part-time virtual secondment, working as part of a WHO team to model household survey data to gain better insight into the use of polluting fuels. The project leverages Dr Stoner’s previous research and collaboration with the WHO. One challenge posed by the data, requiring custom statistical methods, is its structure as percentages adding up to 100 percent. For example, 40 percent of people in a country might rely on biomass fuels for cooking, 30 percent on gas, 20 percent on electricity, and 10 percent on kerosene. In addition, the number and quality of household surveys can vary markedly from one country to another; household survey data capturing the fuels used for heating are especially sparse. To address these challenges, Dr Stoner designed a new statistical framework, developing a reusable and adaptable statistical program in R code.

Outcomes

Enhanced monitoring of SDG7

Dr Stoner’s estimates on the use of polluting cooking fuels are published in the yearly Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report. For the 2023 SDG7 report, he provided a new supporting analysis on the number of countries on track to reach 95 percent access to clean cooking fuels within different timeframes and how much acceleration is needed to achieve 100 percent access by 2030. For the 2024 SDG7 report, he estimated that six countries are responsible for 92 percent of global progress in clean cooking and that 24 million people in high-income countries still rely on polluting cooking fuels and technologies.

Tracking polluting household heating

The IAA project has resulted in a new model for estimating the global use of polluting fuels for home heating, categorising people into groups based on their use of low to medium, and high-emission fuels and technologies, or not using household heating. Dr Stoner’s research reveals that around 2 billion people, or one in four people globally, could be living in households mainly relying on highly polluting heating methods – a figure that has been gradually increasing in recent decades. Dr Stoner is currently preparing a submission to Lancet Planetary Health based on this groundbreaking work, laying the groundwork for a specific heating indicator in future revisions of the SDGs. Following publication acceptance, plans are in place to highlight the findings in future SDG7 tracking reports, and to publish a condensed report on polluting household heating on the WHO website.

Strategic collaboration with the WHO

The IAA provided valuable time to develop planning and strategy with the WHO for future collaborations. Dr Stoner integrated these plans into his application for a Future Leaders Fellowship, which, although unsuccessful, received strong support from the WHO. He also facilitated a meeting between leadership in the School of Mathematics & Statistics and the WHO to discuss establishing a WHO Collaborating Centre at Glasgow. In 2024, Dr Stoner used IAA funds to visit the WHO headquarters in Geneva twice.

Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA) of the United Nations

Dr Stoner also dedicated time to collaborating with the Forestry Office at the FAO, assisting in the development of models for global wood fuel and charcoal production. They found that his estimates, developed with the WHO, of charcoal use for cooking were the most important predictor of wood charcoal production in the global south. The manuscript has been submitted to Nature Communications. Dr. Stoner used IAA funds to visit the FAO headquarters in Rome.