2026-07-14 · people
One in three still cook with polluting fuels
Indoor air pollution from solid fuels remains a silent killer in many homes.
Smoke from wood, charcoal, dung, and coal still fills a third of the world's kitchens — and it kills, driving pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, COPD, and lung cancer. In this 2026 grid of 8.2 billion people, 67% have access to clean cooking fuels; the other 33%, about 2.7 billion people, do not.
1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
Clean cooking access has climbed from roughly half the world's population in 2000 to about two-thirds by 2020, and the total number of people without clean fuels has slowly declined since then.
Access remains very low across Sub-Saharan Africa, while South and East Asia have driven much of the recent progress; Southeast Asia cut solid-fuel use from nearly its entire population to just over half.
The divide tracks income: in high-income countries, cooking with solid fuels is entirely a thing of the past, while access to clean fuels and electricity remains low in poorer nations.
IEA / WHO clean cooking access shares.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-07-14-clean-cooking