What is an ADALY?

Averted Disability Adjusted Life Years (ADALYs) are a commonly used metric for public health reporting. They represent the number of years of healthy life made possible by a given intervention and can also be used to calculate the economic cost of poor health.

Gold Standard has built upon the ground-breaking work of Kirk Smith and the Berkeley Air Institute to develop a first-of-its-kind methodology to quantify the health benefits from implementation of technologies that reduce household air pollution from clean cooking and heating technologies using ADALYs as the key indicator. The ADALY methodology calculates the number of years of healthy life saved by reducing personal exposure to air pollution in the form of black carbon or particulate matter (PM2.5).

Read more information on DALYs

Why finance ADALYs?

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that exposure to smoke from the simple act of cooking is the fourth leading risk factor for disease in developing countries, causing 4.3 million premature deaths per year – more than from malaria or tuberculosis. This smoke causes a range of deadly chronic and acute health effects such as child pneumonia, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and heart disease, as well as low birth-weights.

Health problems caused by indoor air pollution are not only a humanitarian crisis, the burden of disease also poses real economic costs to families, communities and local governments.

By financing ADALYs, you can be certain that your funding has made a direct and verified impact on the health of vulnerable communities. Beyond this, you know that the intervention was cost-effective because it can be directly compared to the burden of disease – that is, it generates more economic benefits than it actually costs.

Improving lives with cleaner cookstoves

Typical wood-fired stoves and open fires emit small particles, carbon monoxide, and other noxious fumes at levels that are up to 100 times higher than the recommended limits set by WHO, and in some settings, considerably higher. Frequent exposure to cookstove smoke can cause disabling health impacts like cataracts, and is the leading cause of blindness in developing countries. The effects are greatest among women and young children—and especially deadly for children under the age of five in developing countries. Nearly half of all pneumonia deaths among this age group occur as a result of smoke exposure.

The sustained use of clean cookstoves and fuels can dramatically reduce smoke emissions and exposure, which can reduce the burden of disease associated with household air pollution.

What can be claimed?

Funding ADALYs can be used to support your organisation’s commitments to the SDGs or healthy lives. It allows you to claim contributions to SDG 3, and target 3.9 specifically, by having a direct and quantifiable impact on human health monitored, verified and certified by Gold Standard. 

The development of the ADALYs methodology was funded by:

Sincere thanks to:

About Gold Standard for the Global Goals

Gold Standard for the Global Goals is a next-generation standard designed to accelerate progress toward climate security and sustainable development. This standard enables initiatives to quantify, certify and maximise their impacts toward the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, with enhanced safeguards, holistic project design, management of trade-offs and local stakeholder engagement to ensure the highest levels of environmental and social integrity.

What defines Gold Standard projects? 

• Stakeholder inclusion. All projects are developed in line with best practice, following a process that is inclusive of affected stakeholders and ensuring their objectives and concerns are represented.

• Safeguard management. All projects are developed in line with best practice, following rigorous safeguards to prevent unintended consequences and manage trade-offs where needed.

• Multiple contributions to Global Goals. All projects contribute holistically to at least three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). All impacts are tracked according to robust monitoring plans, verified by an approved independent third party, and certified by Gold Standard. All projects may claim to be “gender sensitive.” Relevant projects may also claim to be “water sensitive."

• Transparency. Any and all Certified SDG Impacts or financial products issued from Gold Standard project activities are disclosed in a transparent, third-party registry.

• Civil society support. The process followed is endorsed by Gold Standard’s network of NGO supporters who can access and provide input to project reviews.