Benefits and Costs of Improved Cookstoves: Assessing the Implications of Variability in Health, Forest and Climate Impacts, PLoS ONE, Feb 2012. M Jeuland,Duke University.
Current attention to improved cook stoves (ICS) focuses on the “triple benefits” they provide, in improved health and time savings for households, in preservation of forests and associated ecosystem services, and in reducing emissions that contribute to global climate change.
Despite the purported economic benefits of such technologies, progress in achieving large-scale adoption and use has been remarkably slow.
This article documents the costs and benefits of these technologies and the reasons why uptake has been disappointing. Given the current attention to the scale up of ICS, this analysis is timely and important for highlighting some of the challenges to global ICS promotion.
