In a village kitchen in Southern Africa, a woman crouches over an open fire to cook the evening meal. The smoke that fills the room will, over years, damage her lungs and her children’s lungs.
It will also, according to a landmark new UN assessment, cost her country far more in lost health, productivity and climate damage than it would take to fix.
That is the central finding of Hidden Assets: The Economic and Health Case for Climate and Clean Air Action, a new global assessment released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to mark the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies.
The report is billed as the most complete economic picture yet of what climate change and air pollution cost the world, and what fixing them, together, is worth.
The number at the heart of it is striking in its simplicity: for every US$1 invested in an integrated package of climate and clean air solutions, society stands to gain around US$15 in economic benefits. Market returns alone, reduced healthcare spending, higher labour productivity, and avoided physical damage exceed implementation costs within ten years, delivering an internal rate of return of 60%. Even stripped of every non-market benefit, counting only benefits that show up in a ledger, the return is still roughly $4 for every $1 spent.
“Clean cooking isn’t a side issue, it’s central to Africa’s health and economic future,” said Dr. Caradee Wright, Chief Specialist Scientist and lead of the Climate Change and Human Health Research Programme at the South African Medical Research Council.
“With only one in five Africans having access to clean cooking fuels, closing the gap is a powerful investment in lungs, livelihoods and the climate.”
A crisis hiding in plain sight
Air pollution has long been treated as a public health problem. This report insists it is also a macroeconomic one.
In 2025 alone, outdoor air pollution caused an estimated 6.4 million premature deaths worldwide. Indoor, or household, air pollution, driven overwhelmingly by cooking over open fires or solid-fuel stoves, added a further 2 million deaths, including close to 300,000 among children.
The toll extends well beyond mortality statistics. Fine particulate matter exposure was linked to 5.5 million new cases of childhood asthma and 2 million new cases of dementia in 2025 alone, representing one in every five new dementia diagnoses recorded globally that year.
Millions more cases of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease compound the burden on households and health systems alike.
Left unchecked, the problem will get worse before it gets better. Without further policy action, the report projects that the share of the global population exposed to the most dangerous levels of fine particulate matter will rise from 27% today to 34% by 2050, even as populations age and become more vulnerable to its effects.
The assessment evaluated 25 proven, existing solutions spanning energy, industry, transport, agriculture, residential cooking and waste — measures like cleaner cookstoves, vehicle emissions standards, methane leak controls and dietary shifts. Deployed together, they could prevent 144 million premature deaths by 2050 and eliminate 60–70% of the world’s total air pollution health burden.
“Africa cannot afford to tackle climate change and air pollution in isolation,” said Gerphas Opondo, Executive Director of the Environmental Compliance Institute.
“Integrated action can save lives, cut pollution and strengthen economies, while ensuring the greatest benefits reach communities carrying the greatest burden.”
Africa: the highest returns on Earth
Of the fifteen world regions the assessment analysed, none shows a more compelling investment case than Southern Africa, where every dollar spent on integrated solutions is projected to return 26 dollars in economic benefits, the single highest ratio recorded anywhere in the study. Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa each return an estimated 11 to 1.
The reasons are structural. Africa carries a disproportionate share of the world’s household air pollution burden: in 2020, only 20% of the continent’s population had access to clean cooking fuels, forcing hundreds of millions of households to rely on solid fuels that fill homes with smoke daily.
Because so much of that harm is preventable with technology that already exists, better stoves, cleaner fuels, more efficient energy systems, the potential gains from acting are unusually large relative to the cost.
In Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, clean cooking and heating solutions alone deliver the largest share of near-term economic benefit, by a wide margin, through to 2035.
By mid-century, that benefit begins to shift toward household energy transformation and vehicle emissions standards, as clean cooking gains are progressively captured.
In North Africa, where oil and gas production is more central to the economy, the biggest near-term wins instead come from controlling methane leakage, venting and flaring in that sector, described in the report as “among the most cost-effective measures available anywhere.”
Across the continent, the solutions could avoid damages equivalent to 3.5–4% of regional GDP by 2035 in Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, rising as high as 13.5% of GDP by the end of the century in Southern Africa alone, a scale of avoided loss few other investments could match.
The price of waiting
If the economics are this favourable, why hasn’t the world already acted at scale? The report’s answer is blunt: the obstacles are rarely technical or even financial. They are institutional.
Implementation of the 25 solutions is running roughly 7.5 to 8 years behind a notional 15-year rollout schedule, and institutional barriers, siloed decision-making between ministries, weak enforcement capacity, fragmented coordination, account for the single largest share of that delay.
The technology exists. The money, in many cases, exists too: current global government spending on fossil fuel subsidies, at 2.18% of GDP, is more than three times what it would cost to fund the full implementation of all 25 solutions.
Delay is not a neutral choice, it is an expensive one. Every year of inaction forgoes more than 0.5% of global GDP in benefits, equivalent to over US$1.5 trillion annually, and much of that lost ground can never be fully recovered. Health impacts avoided today cannot simply be “made up” later; a life saved from cleaner air this decade is not equivalent to one saved a decade from now.
The report illustrates the point with a case study from Delhi, India. Meeting national air quality standards on schedule from 2026 would cut the city’s cumulative exposure to fine particulate matter by 20% by 2040. An eight-year delay, roughly the global average currently expected, cuts that benefit in half.
Conversely, moving faster pays off fast. Accelerating implementation of enabling reforms alone, better institutional coordination, stronger regulatory capacity, faster financing pathways, could unlock up to US$10 trillion in additional health and economic benefits by 2040, without needing any new technology at all.
What has to happen now
The report closes with a five-point call to action for governments, financial institutions and international bodies:
- Treat integrated climate and clean air policy as core economic strategy, embedded in national growth plans and fiscal frameworks — not sidelined as an environmental add-on.
- Invest early in enabling conditions: affordable finance, institutional capacity, and cross-ministerial coordination that shorten implementation delays.
- Target rapid wins — clean cooking, methane leak controls, transport and air quality measures — that are largely within national control and pay back within a decade.
- Align international finance with the regions carrying the greatest burden and offering the highest returns, particularly across the developing world.
- Invest in the data and monitoring infrastructure — air quality networks, emissions inventories, health data — that underpins credible decision-making.
Benefit-cost ratios vary widely across the fifteen regions studied, from 3 to 1 in the European Union, the UK and the European Free Trade Association, where decades of pollution control have already captured many of the easy gains, up to 26 to 1 in Southern Africa. But the report is emphatic that every single region studied comes out ahead. As its authors put it, no region should wait for others to move first.
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