Achieving Nepal's clean cooking ambitions: an open source and geospatial cost–benefit analysis

Cooking with traditional fuels can lead to severe health issues caused by household air pollution, and can also affect gender equality and drive environmental degradation. In Nepal, despite government efforts to promote electric cooking, more than half of the population still uses traditional fuels, with electric cooking adoption remaining below 1%. Several of the barriers to and enablers of clean cooking vary geographically; however, few studies have considered spatial explicit information in planning national-scale transitions to clean cooking. In this study we provide a spatially explicit roadmap to estimate the required investments and benefits gained from the transition across Nepal. This study uses geospatial modelling methods to evaluate strategies to achieve the Government of Nepal's vision for a national-scale transition to clean cooking. We integrate the open-source clean cooking geospatial assessment tool OnStove and a spatial multicriteria analysis model. With OnStove, we evaluate which cooking technologies and fuels maximise the net benefits of a clean-cooking transition across each km2 of the region. With the multicriteria analysis, we weigh stakeholder preferences and prioritise areas of action where policy should be implemented. We used the most up-to-date geospatial data to the year 2023, such as the High Resolution Settlement Layer, Open Street Maps’ road networks, the Global Human Settlement Layer, NASA/USGS forest cover maps, and Facebook's Relative Wealth Index, among others. We also relied on data from the Nepal Oil Corporation, the Nepal Electricity Agency, the Central Bureau of Statistic's 2021 national census, and the Alternative Energy Promotion Center. We evaluate four scenarios capturing advances on clean cooking policy up to the year 2022, current market inefficiencies, and the potential effects of new policies for clean-cooking transition in Nepal. Our results show that transitional and clean cooking technologies provide higher net benefits than traditional options everywhere across Nepal in all scenarios. Our net-benefit analysis shows that around 9563 deaths could be averted yearly if benefits and externalities were perceived and valued correctly. Furthermore, substantial benefits could be achieved in regard to greenhouse gas emissions avoidance, time saved, and health-cost reductions. Our results also show that the current subsidy strategy from the Government of Nepal is well aligned with the benefits achieved under a cost–