Source: Forbes, June 6, 2012
The Worst Health Risk You’ve Never Heard of (guest post by Jacob Moss)
This post is written by Jacob Moss, Director of the US Cookstoves Initiative in the Secretary of State’s Office of Global Partnerships at the US Department of State.
For much of the developing world, preparing a meal is a one of the most dangerous activities a woman can undertake. She may spend half a day scavenging for fuel to build a fire. She must then spend hours tending the fire. Throughout the process, the home is filled with acrid, toxic smoke that irritates eyes and burns lungs.
Exposure to smoke from cooking over an open fire kills two million people each year. Young kids die from respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia, while women die from chronic lung diseases such as emphysema. Many millions more will suffer from severe burns, impaired breathing, chronic cough, or even blindness. The economic impacts are also considerable – women and girls who cook on traditional fires spend up to three hours each day collecting fuel, time that could be much better spent on farming, starting a small enterprise, or going to school. In conflict zones, collecting fuel puts women and girls at risk of personal attack and rape. Cooking with wood also contributes to forest degradation, loss of wildlife habitat, and climate change. Open fire cooking accounts for over 20 percent of black carbon, one of the worst near-term contributors to climate change.
Cleaner stoves that dramatically reduce smoke will go a long way to reducing these health, economic, and environmental risks. More fuel-efficient stoves will reduce the time spent collecting fuel and relieve some of the pressure on scarce natural resources. It’s clear that the use of cleaner, more fuel-efficient stoves offers dramatic benefits.
Unfortunately, recent press around cookstoves has over-generalized the results of a recent MIT/Harvard study and created uncertainty about the effectiveness of clean cookstoves. The study itself found that women in rural India who bought cheap mud stoves essentially stopped using them after a year. Benefits dropped off in a corresponding fashion. This sounds damning, and press has portrayed it as such, but in fact the study itself is a great contribution to the sector. It underscores the challenges of identifying a stove that people will want to buy, use, and maintain, as well as the need to test stoves in field settings. It also raises serious questions about an approach of essentially giving away lower-end stoves: if women don’t value the stoves, they won’t use or maintain them.
These results are entirely consistent with current efforts to promote clean cooking solutions by focusing on building commercial markets for increasingly high-quality and affordable stoves and fuels that meet the needs of the people who will use them. And in fact, the sector is rapidly innovating in a number of areas, including research, business models, and adoption.
Recent studies demonstrate the potential of clean cookstoves and give us confidence that today’s solutions could achieve dramatic health and climate benefits. For example, last fall Berkeley researchers showed for the first time that dramatically reducing exposure to cookstove smoke yields significant reductions in severe childhood pneumonia. Research published in February by The Energy Research Institute of India showed that advanced cookstoves will substantially reduce black carbon emissions in field settings, and several studies have shown that many new cookstoves are effective in real-world settings at reducing fuel use. Forthcoming research will build on these and other efforts.
Innovative businesses are already successfully selling stoves at impressive scales. For example, First Energy of India has sold over 500,000 clean stoves that are fueled by biomass pellets created from agricultural crop wastes, while GERES/Cambodia has sold over 1.5 million fuel-efficient stoves through an innovative, distributed manufacturing network. Emerging innovative leaders include CleanStar Mozambique, who just launched an effort to displace unsustainable charcoal use with locally produced ethanol, with aspirations to expand to charcoal markets across Africa.
There are also emerging innovations to make stoves more affordable and achieve sustained adoption. Carbon financing is being leveraged to significantly lower the prices of their stoves and fuels – but revenue only flows to the extent stoves are actually used and save fuel. Emerging work indicates that addressing awareness (e.g., consumer campaigns) and affordability (e.g., stove loans) barriers simultaneously may be more effective than concentrating on either piece individually. And many enterprises are finding that an ongoing local customer support presence can help achieve sustained adoption.
Many innovative businesses are also very creatively addressing affordability and adoption barriers. For example, Inyenyeri of Rwanda is giving more costly, advanced stoves (bought from African Clean Energy of Lesotho) to rural families – a model justified based on a pellet fuel business that will be affordable to the rural poor through profits from urban markets (by out-competing charcoal). Biolite will soon manufacture a clean stove that can charge a cell phone (by converting waste heat into electricity), thereby offering monetary savings even for those consumers that do not pay for fuel.
Will these many innovations all succeed? Probably not, at least as currently envisioned. They, and many other similar businesses, are all learning and adapting as they go. Evaluation will be central to learning which of these and other strategies are most effective.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was launched in 2010 to transform this sector and achieve a bold goal of enabling 100 million homes to adopt clean cooking solutions by 2020. The Alliance now counts nearly 400 partners, including thirty-four countries, and actress Julia Roberts and chefJosé Andrés have signed on as Ambassadors. As U.S. Secretary of StateHillary Clinton highlighted at the launch of the Alliance, research, evaluation, and a commercial approach will all be needed to succeed. The U.S. government has committed up to $105 million under the Alliance – most of which targets either applied research (e.g., health, technology, stove testing, evaluation, adoption, climate) or debt financing for large-scale cookstove businesses. Similarly, the Alliance is leading efforts to create first-ever global standards (e.g., a consumer scorecard for stoves on factors like efficiency, emissions, and safety) and has begun to fund cutting-edge research, innovative business models, working capital funds, and capacity building.
Building a market of advanced solutions that the world’s poorest populations will want to buy and use is not an overnight fix, but today’s solutions are an excellent start. Our challenge is to simultaneously push both the business and consumer sides of this market so that increasingly advanced cooking solutions – that women want and can afford – become the norm around the world. With two million lives at stake each year, we can’t afford to wait.
