After joining the GBD 2021 Household Air Pollution team, an international effort to quantify the global health burden of household air pollution from 1990 to 2021, I expected familiar work: analysing how indoor smoke harms the body. Instead, what first looked like household data revealed a far deeper picture of global inequity.
The urgency of that inequity has rarely felt more immediate. In December 2025, the UK government published an updated environmental plan that would impose tighter restrictions on wood-burning stoves – a move aimed at cutting PM2.5 pollution, the fine particulate matter small enough to enter the lungs and bloodstream, linked to serious health risks.
