energy

In this chapter, the principal environmental and health impacts of energy are discussed according to the scale at which they occur. About half of the world’s households use solid fuels (biomass and coal) for cooking and heating in simple devices that produce large amounts of air pollution—pollution that is probably responsible for 4–5 percent of the global burden of disease. The chief ecosystem impacts relate to charcoal production and fuelwood harvesting. At the workplace scale, solid-fuel fuel cycles create significant risks for workers and have the largest impacts on populations among