Indoor smoke from cooking fires claims over 4000 lives a day in the developing world, yet the international community is failing to act. Join Practical Action in campaigning for urgent action to tackle the killer in the kitchen.

Around the world, poverty condemns nearly half of humanity to cook using fuels that produce smoke when burnt - fuels such as wood, dung, crop-waste and coal. Over 1.5 million people die every year from illnesses caused by this smoke – a life lost every 20 seconds.

Smoke is not an indiscriminate killer – it hits women and small children the hardest. Women across the developing world typically spend three to seven hours a day cooking by the fire, exposed to levels of smoke over 100 times the recommended limits. Illnesses caused by smoke include chronic bronchitis, acute lower respiratory infections such as pneumonia, and lung cancer. There is also increasing evidence linking it to asthma, TB and low birth weight.

The scale of the problem is immense, but there are practical solutions. Practical Action (formerly ITDG), an international development agency, has been working with communities in Kenya, Sudan and Nepal to develop improved stoves, smoke hoods, chimneys and improved ventilation.

However, this global crisis needs a global solution to match the scale of the problem. The international community is slowly gearing up to tackle indoor air pollution, with initiatives from the World Health Organisation, the launch of the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air and the United Nations Development Programme’s LPG Challenge. However, compared with the international community’s response to hunger, HIV/AIDS, dirty water and poor sanitation and malaria, there has been extremely limited funding and insufficient high-level political backing for such initiatives. Without concerted action on indoor smoke, the international community will fail to meet its own targets for poverty reduction - the Millennium Development Goals.

Practical Action is calling for the introduction of an UN-led Global Action Plan to tackle indoor smoke. The 15th session of the UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development will meet next year in New York. Focussing on fours themes including ‘energy for sustainable development’ and ‘air pollution’, the conference offers a unique opportunity for the international community to make a commitment to tackle indoor air pollution. Please join Practical Action in campaigning for a Global Action Plan.

For more information about Practical Action and its campaign on indoor air pollution, visit www.practicalaction.org/smoke or contact Adam Musgrave.