Grantee Research Project Results

The most significant accomplishment of the current project was to increase the global total of 3 in-field emissions measurements of EC OC and PM2.5 from traditional stoves at the start of the project, by adding 174 emissions measurements from household stoves around the Himalayan region using a variety of fuels and under a range of agroclimatic conditions. In particular, the current project contributes a large number of new measurements using dung, crop residues, raw coal and mixed fuels. The increased number of in-field measurements during normal daily cooking and heating activities provides convincing evidence that emission factors for PM2.5 in g/kg dry fuel were substantially underestimated by factors that range from ~3-10 in previous emissions inventories, that consisted largely of controlled laboratory tests, and that the relative sectoral contribution of solid fuel use in household stoves to global PM2.5 concentrations is substantially larger than previously thought. There were not enough EC and OC emissions measurements for household solid fuel use in previous inventories to enable thorough comparison, which has been rectified by the current project. 

 

Another major accomplishment of the current project is to add 36 measurements of small scale industries in rural areas, a sector that has previously been practically uncharacterized and not included in emission inventories. Until recently little has been known about how many small-scale enterprises are present in rural areas and even less about the air pollution emission intensity of the processes being used, but there is a growing appreciation that large numbers combined with the inefficiency of the combustion processes can result in large sectoral contributions.  

 

We expect the data produced as part of this project will be used widely in emissions inventories used in bottom-up models by the climate modeling community to reconcile differences between bottom-up emissions models and measured atmospheric concentrations, and will inform on the overall climate and health implications of solid fuel use in households.