Abstract
Air pollution from wood burning is a serious problem in the developing world. In the cities of south-central Chile, households experience extremely high ambient air pollution levels due to massive combustion of wood as fuel for residential heating. To address this problem, in recent years new residential wood stoves—equipped with improved combustion technologies that are designed to be less-polluting—have replaced high-polluting ones. However, users’ behaviour in operating these improved stoves is a key factor that drives actual emissions. When users ‘choke the damper’ to extend the burning time of their wood fuel, it constrains the air flow in the wood stoves and creates a highly polluting combustion process. To address this issue, a behavioural intervention was designed to provide users with real-time feedback on their wood stoves’ air pollution emissions with the goal of ‘nudging’ them to use their stoves in a less polluting way. The intervention consists of an information sign that aligns with the wood stove’s damper lever and informs users about pollution emission levels according to the chosen setting of the wood stove’s damper. The information sign is complemented by the visit of a field assistant that explains the sign and provides an informational flyer (fridge magnet). To assess the effectiveness of this behavioural intervention a randomized controlled trial was conducted with selected households in the city of Valdivia, Chile. Results from this intervention show that households that were provided with the information sign reduced the frequency with which they used the most polluting settings of their stoves, inducing a behavioural change that results in a 10.8% reduction in residential pollution emissions.
Highlights
Household air pollution from wood fuel burning is a serious problem for many low-income and middle-income countries (Chávez et al 2011a, b)
We find no evidence that the reduction in emissions reported in the previous section are countervailed by an increase in wood fuel usage
We examined whether pro-environment change induced by the treatment would result in increased wood fuel expenditure
Summary
Household air pollution from wood fuel burning is a serious problem for many low-income and middle-income countries (Chávez et al 2011a, b). This phenomenon of increasing outdoor air pollution as a consequence of increased adoption of improved wood burning technologies (i.e., closed combustion chambers, chimneys, etc.) is increasingly being experienced by more countries in the developing world, creating a combined problem of indoor and outdoor air pollution (Balakrishnan et al 2013; Hu et al 2020) This is a challenge in some developed countries, especially in rural areas and in the outskirts of cities where households use firewood as a primary or secondary fuel for heating (Hine et al 2011; US EPA 2013). To mitigate emissions from wood fuel burning, Chile’s Ministry of Environment has designed and implemented Air Pollution Control and Prevention Plans (PPDAs, according to the Spanish acronym) in most of the cities in this region.9 Under these PPDAs, it has mandated that only high efficiency “double combustion” stoves to be available in the market since the early 2000s. As a result of these policies, thousands of households in Chile’s south-central region have upgraded to this new stove technology over the last decades
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
