Many people in South Asia, Africa and South America are exposed to soot from mud stoves used for cooking, heating and light. The stoves emit particles of black carbon which can be inhaled deeply into the lungs and have been linked to serious health problems.

Improved cook stoves, which include a range of new technologies to burn wood and fuel more cleanly, have been proposed as a solution to the problem of black carbon. This new study investigated how effective the new stoves were in reducing emissions.

The researchers carried out a small-scale test on five different models of improved stoves. They conducted the test in real homes in a village in India.

The results showed that black carbon concentrations from all five models varied significantly, even for the same stove from one day to the next. They also found that some of the modern stoves occasionally emitted more black carbon than traditional mud cook stoves.

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