2026-09-27 · people

One in three still cook with polluting fuels

Indoor air pollution from solid fuels remains a silent killer in many homes.

One in three people — roughly 2.7 billion of the world's 8.2 billion — still cook with wood, charcoal, dung, or coal, and the smoke is a silent killer linked to pneumonia, stroke, heart disease, COPD, and lung cancer. Clean cooking access reached 67% in 2026, up from about half the world in 2000, but the last third is concentrated in poorer countries and rural homes.

1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells

Context

The direction of travel is positive: about half the world had clean cooking fuels in 2000, roughly two-thirds by 2020, and this edition's 2026 figures put clean access at 67%. The total number of people without clean cooking fuels has slowly declined since 2000.

Geography matters enormously. Access to clean fuels remains very low across Sub-Saharan Africa, while South and East Asia have driven much of the world's progress over the last decade. In high-income countries, cooking with solid fuels is essentially a thing of the past.

The divide also runs along income and, within countries, between city and countryside: energy access correlates strongly with GDP per capita, and rural households lag urban ones almost everywhere. The fuels doing the damage — wood, crop residues, dung, charcoal, and coal — fill enclosed homes with smoke.

IEA / WHO clean cooking access shares.