Environmental and health impacts from the introduction of improved wood stoves: evidence from a field experiment in Guatemala Daniel Ludwinski • Kent Moriarty • Bruce Wydick Received: 21 October 2010 / Accepted: 6 January 2011 / Published online: 26 January 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract Improved wood-burning stoves offer a possible solution that can simulta- neously impact both problems of deforestation and problems of respiratory health in developing countries. We carried out a field experiment in which new fuel-efficient woodstoves were allocated in a Guatemalan village via the use of a lottery. A 2008 baseline survey was carried out on 2,148 individuals in 351 households, and then a follow- up survey was carried out in 2009, 4 months after households received the stoves. We found that households with the new stoves reduced wood consumption by an average of 59.1%. We also found indications of reductions in indoor air related health problems, where point estimates indicate a significant reduction in reported respiratory symptoms by 48.6% among women and 63.3% among children. Keywords Biomass fuel  Indoor air pollution  Deforestation  Wood stoves  Field experiments 1 Introduction The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that nearly half of the world’s popu- lation uses biomass fuels for normal household activities such as cooking and heating Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue. D. Ludwinski MarketBridge Inc., 33 New Montgomery, Suite 220, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA e-mail: dludwinski@gmail.com K. Moriarty Rainin Instruments, 7500 Edgewater Drive, Oakland, CA 94621-3027, USA e-mail: kentnann@hotmail.com B. Wydick (&) University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco, CA 94117, USA e-mail: wydick@usfca.edu 123 Environ Dev Sustain (2011) 13:657–676 DOI 10.1007/s10668-011-9282-z