Call it a stove in every pot. Make that two stoves in every pot.
That’s because Peru could have bought every rural poor two energy efficient stoves in 2007 for the equivalent of what Indoor Air Pollution cost the country.
As we discussed last week, The Charcoal Project is leading a research on a global analysis that would put a price tag on the inefficient domestic combustion of biomass as practiced today in the vast majority of the developing world.
Our friends at the World Bank were kind enough to point us to their Country Environmental Analysis (CEAs) reports on their website.
We randomly selected the 2007 assessment for Peru. The dense 300+ page document does contain however some very valuable information, including this eye-popping table below:
Here’s the fine print to satisfy your inner development geek:
3.39 Total annual cost of indoor air pollution is estimated at 0.55-1.0 billion soles, with a mean estimate of 0.78 billion (Table 3.22). The cost of mortality for adults is based on the value of statistical life (VSL) as a high bound and HCA as a low bound, and on the human capital approach (HCA) for children. The cost of morbidity includes the cost of illness (medical treatment, and value of lost time for adults) and DALYs from morbidity valued at GDP per capita to reflect the cost of reduced well-being associated with illness. The value of time for adults is 75 percent of urban and rural average hourly wages, which are 3.8 SI. and 2.5 SI. respectively.
3.40 There is very little information about the frequency of doctor visits, emergency visits and hospitalization for COPD patients in any country in the world. Schulman et al. (2001) and Niederman et al. (1999) provide some information on this from the United States and Europe. Figures derived from these studies are applied to Peru in this chapter. Estimated lost work days per year is based on frequency of estimated medical treatment plus an additional 7 days for each hospitalization and one extra day for each doctor and emergency visit. These days were added to reflect time needed for recovery from illness.
3.41 To estimate the cost of a new case of COPD, the medical cost and value of time losses have been discounted over a 20-year duration of illness. An annual real increase of 2 percent in medical cost and value of time has been applied to reflect an average expected increase in annual labor productivity and real wages. The costs were discounted at 3 percent per year, a rate commonly applied by WHO for health effects.
A conversion shows that the high end cost of IAP (rounded to 1 billion Peruvian soles) in the table above is equivalent to 321,123,160 in 2007 US Dollar
Add to this sum the cost of labor lost, deterioration of environmental services, and CO2 emissions and I bet the amount is closer to 500,000 million USD.
This figure is purely speculative but we hope our pending global review will shed more light on the actual cost.
Oh, in case you were wondering, U$321,123,160 will buy you about 16 million rocket stoves at $20 a pop.
There were about six million rural poor in Peru in 2007.
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