We ana­lyzed the mor­tal­i­ty impacts and green­house gas (GHG) emissions

pro­duced by house­hold ener­gy use in Africa. Under a busi­ness-as-usu­al (BAU)

sce­nario, house­hold indoor air pol­lu­tion will cause an esti­mat­ed 9.8 million

pre­ma­ture deaths by the year 2030. Grad­ual and rapid tran­si­tions to charcoal

would delay 1.0 mil­lion and 2.8 mil­lion deaths, respec­tive­ly; sim­i­lar transitions

to petro­le­um fuels would delay 1.3 mil­lion and 3.7 mil­lion deaths. Cumulative

BAU GHG emis­sions will be 6.7 bil­lion tons of car­bon by 2050, which is 5.6% of

Africa’s total emis­sions. Large shifts to the use of fos­sil fuels would reduce

GHG emis­sions by 1 to 10%. Char­coal-inten­sive future sce­nar­ios using current

prac­tices increase emis­sions by 140 to 190%; the increase can be reduced to 5

to 36% using cur­rent­ly avail­able tech­nolo­gies for sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion or

poten­tial­ly reduced even more with invest­ment in tech­no­log­i­cal innovation.