Abstract
Achieving universal access to clean cooking is essential for improving health, equality, environmental, and other sustainability outcomes. Yet without accelerated action, 1.8 billion people will still lack access to clean cooking in 2030. Research can support the design of evidence-based clean cooking strategies that are tailored to local realities. Here, we propose a research agenda to accelerate clean cooking transitions. Key areas of focus include enhancing modern and clean technologies, developing better and more inclusive planning tools, integrating co-benefits, addressing behavioral and affordability challenges, fostering innovative policy and business models, as well as understanding the political economy of clean cooking. For such research to be effective in empowering local communities, attention to clean cooking needs to be more effectively integrated into educational curricula and embody the principles of interdisciplinary and open science. Collaborative efforts are imperative to drive this transition and achieve significant benefits across sustainable development spheres.
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Access to clean cooking is fundamental to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals, yet progress remains far too slow. Despite recent gains, nearly 1.8 billion people are projected to lack access to clean cooking in 2030, with the largest deficits in Sub-Saharan Africa. Reliance on polluting fuels continues to drive millions of premature deaths annually from household air pollution, disproportionately affecting women and children, while also contributing to deforestation, climate change, and lost economic opportunities. Clean cooking is therefore not only an energy challenge but a critical sustainable development priority.
Research has played a central role in reshaping the clean cooking agenda. Beyond documenting health and environmental harm, recent work has advanced the evaluation of technologies, clarified adoption barriers, and informed system-level planning and policy design through data-driven tools. This growing evidence base shows that technology availability alone is insufficient: sustained transitions depend on affordability, behavior, governance, gender dynamics, and alignment with broader energy and development strategies.
This perspective situates clean cooking within the wider energy transition and outlines a research agenda based on the role of research in the transition. It highlights priorities across technology development, behavioral and policy design, planning tools, political economy, and the assessment of costs and co-benefits. Advancing this agenda requires interdisciplinary collaboration, stronger engagement with local knowledge and education systems, and open science approaches that enable context-specific, scalable solutions. Addressing clean cooking at scale requires research, tools, and institutions that reflect local realities, inform policy and investment decisions, and enable sustained adoption across diverse contexts.
Clean cooking remains one of the most under-addressed challenges in the global energy transition, with major implications for health, gender equality, climate, and development, among others. This perspective synthesizes recent research and proposes a forward-looking agenda to accelerate clean cooking transitions, spanning technology innovation, behavioral and affordability barriers, cost-benefit assessments, planning tools, finance, and political economy. Advancing this agenda requires interdisciplinary and inclusive research; stronger links between science, education, and local capacity building; publicly available tools; and collaborative approaches that translate evidence into context-specific, scalable solutions for universal access.