I summarize a recent paper evaluating an intervention to reduce air pollution: paying farmers not to burn their crop residue.
A pure conditional contract is ineffective, but when farmers are paid some fraction upfront, they reduce crop burning significantly.
The authors calculate that this contract saves a life for $5,000, comparable to GiveWell's top charities; however, these averted deaths may be among the elderly and thus not reflect many years of life saved.
I also calculate promising climate co-benefits; this intervention reduces GHG emissions for roughly $36 a ton, which costs less than the social cost of carbon, but more than the best climate mitigation strategies.
I strongly recommend further research and piloting as a way to build on this single study, especially given the lack of scalable air pollution interventions in EA.

Air pollution causes at least 7 million premature deaths each year. Despite this, it has only recently surfaced as a top cause for effective altruists, with Open Philanthropy announcing South Asian air quality as its newest focus area last year. Even with this recent focus, grants have focused mostly on research rather than on interventions to actually improve air quality. The problem is that we don't yet have shovel-ready air pollution interventions, demonstrably cost-effective interventions that are feasible and scalable for charities to implement themselves (rather than relying on uncertain advocacy). I think one recent paper offers a cost-effective, feasible and scalable intervention to reduce air pollution, and we should investigate it much more closely.

Overview

One pernicious source of air pollution in developing countries^[1] is crop residue burning, where farmers burn the remnants of their summer crop to quickly clear the fields for their winter crop. The pollution from this burning causes 66,000 premature deaths a year in India alone. Both bans on crop burning and subsidizing alternatives have failed, leaving crop burning in desperate need of a solution.

A new working paper by Kelsey Jack, Seema Jayachandran, Namrata Kala and Rohini Pande proposes one solution: paying farmers directly not to burn crop residue, with a partial payment upfront and the remainder conditional on not burning. They show this contract reduces crop burning with an RCT, while purely conditional payments have no effect. Importantly, they also calcu...