Burning wood at home adds more particle pollution to the UK’s air than the exhausts of all of the vehicles on its roads, but there is very little information on where this burning takes place and who is most affected.
To address this knowledge gap, researchers have produced the first high-resolution map of wood burning in England and Wales.
Dr Laura Horsfall, from University College London, said: “We began investigating domestic wood burning after our earlier study identified rising rates of lung cancer in non-smokers living in affluent areas of the UK. This raised important questions about potential exposure to carcinogens from wood smoke, as the use of wood fuel for home heating has increased in recent years.”
Horsfall’s team analysed 26m energy performance certificates for 18m homes in England and Wales. These certificates are required when renting or selling a home and describe how well-insulated a home is and how it is heated. They calculated that 9.3% of the homes in England and Wales had solid-fuel heating, mainly for burning wood.
With availability of local wood, it is no surprise that the proportion of homes with wood burners is greatest in rural areas, especially in the south-west and north-west of England and in Wales. The Isles of Scilly tops the list for the local council with highest proportion of homes with burners (44%). The lowest is 0.5% of homes in Newham, east London. There were differences even within urban areas. In London the highest proportions of homes with wood burners were in the south-west suburbs and in Bromley, where parts of the borough have been exempted from smoke control legislation since it was first applied in the 1950s and 1960s.
The researchers found that the spatial density of burners determines the amount of air pollution that builds up in neighbourhoods on winter evenings. The density of wood burners was greatest in urban areas outside the major cities. Worthing, Norwich, Reading, Cambridge and Hastings councils had more than 100 wood burners per square kilometre.
In separate research on 6,900 preschool children in New Zealand, the spatial density of solid-fuel heating was also associated with an increased risk of emergency hospital admissions.
Horsfall said: “The sharp contrasts across small urban areas were particularly striking. What stood out most, though, was the high concentration of wood burners in smoke-control areas.”
In Sheffield the greatest density of burners was found in the west of the city, and in Greater Manchester it was mainly around Stockport and Trafford. All these are smoke-control areas, raising questions about their effectiveness.
Combining the home energy data with data on deprivation reveals that wood burning is overwhelmingly a pastime of those in the wealthiest areas. Most people had other forms of heating available, too. The certificates also revealed a steady increase in homes with a wood burner since 2009, with a sharp rise since 2022.
Horsfall said: “We’re in a situation similar to what happened with diesel cars where we were encouraged to use an apparently environmentally friendly option, only to later discover its unanticipated impact on air quality.”
• This article was amended on 18 April 2025. An earlier version stated that burning wood at home adds more particle pollution to the air than vehicles on the roads; however, this should have said the exhausts of the vehicles.
