In Memoriam: Kirk R. Smith

Abstract

He was an author on more than 400 publications, including his 1987 book, Biofuels, Air Pollution, and Health. He introduced and elaborated on various frameworks and concepts-including intake fraction, climate and health cobenefits, and the environmental risk transition-that are fundamental parts of environmental health today. His groundbreaking work on the first global comparative risk assessment firmly established household energy as a leading risk factor for global health and later spurred efforts to solidify the link between household and ambient air pollution. For these achievements and many others, he received numerous awards. Kirk began his career evaluating the health impacts of nuclear energy in the 1970s. He founded the Energy Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, the base from which he launched his work in household energy. However, his focus shifted when, while traveling in Asia, he observed that the daily task of cooking with available biomass fuels posed a substantial potential risk to human health. In early, pioneering work, Kirk characterized air pollution from smoky stoves as a major health risk in low-resource countries that depend on biomass for cooking. In the early 1980s, he was the first to measure personal exposures to particulate air pollution in homes with biomass cookstoves. He recognized the implications of the very high kitchen concentrations found in rural households-and the global scale of the problem-particularly for women and young children. In the ensuing decades, he sparked research, technological innovation, and policy change around biomass fuel burning. He challenged researchers, policy makers, and the private sector to view reliance of low-income populations on solid fuels as not just a failing of public health but a matter of equity and fairness: clean air as a basic human right. When his own research convinced him that improved biomass stoves would not yield necessary health gains, he expressed skepticism about marketing untested "improved stoves." He redirected his efforts to emphasize the need for expanding access to cleaner fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and electricity.