Below is the link to a May 2014 Nature article on cookstoves and responses to the article from Kirk Smith, Kaysara Khatun and Brenton Ladd.
Clean break: Improved biomass stoves are not popular, people everywhere deserve modern cooking methods. Nature, May 29, 2014.
- Full text – http://www.nature.com/news/clean-break-1.15292
Excerpt – “It is time for a fundamental shift in strategy — one that moves people away from burning biomass entirely.”
Efforts could be redirected to providing people with the energy they most aspire to: not a stove designed by someone in the developed world to cook cleaner, but the actual stoves used in the developed world, which run on electricity or hydrocarbons such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
This is not an absurd goal. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that bringing electricity and clean-cooking facilities to every person on Earth by 2030 will cost US$49 billion a year. Although that is a considerable sum, the agency points to major commitments by Indonesia, Ghana and Nigeria to aggressively switch large portions of their population to cooking with LPG.
Where will all this new energy come from? It will require some additional consumption of fossil fuels, and that will increase the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the extra pollution would be minimal at the global scale: the IEA estimates that it would boost CO2 emissions by just 0.7% above its base scenario.
Renewable sources should be able to supply a major fraction of the needed energy: electrical micro-grids that use agricultural waste, solar cells or wind turbines to provide energy are popping up, for instance. Clean-cooking programmes have an enduring appeal, just not for their intended users. It is time to rethink the approach.
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Link: http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2014/Nature%20LTE.pdf
Cookstoves: clean up fuel on two fronts, Nature, July 3, 2014- Kirk Smith.
Contrary to the impression you convey (see Nature 509, 533; 2014) biomass-burning cooking technology is advancing steadily. Stoves are now more efficient and emit much less smoke, and will remain popular as long as users can access biomass, such as wood and dung, at zero direct cost. Efforts must therefore continue to make clean fuels available and available fuels clean. In trials of new types of biomass-burning stove — including the trial covered by the 2012 report you mention, one factor contributing to the apparent negative outcome is promoters’ use of the term ‘improved’ to market new stoves, often without justification. This has led to the conclusion that the ‘improvements’ have not worked. Genuine improvements can stem only from systematic testing and assessment. Moreover, randomized controlled trials of health interventions need to follow strict criteria (see, for example, K. R. Smith et al. Lancet 378, 1717–1726; 2011).
This autumn, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in Washington DC and ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, are due to finalize the first health-based emissions standards for biomass stoves. These are informed by the World Health Organization’s upcoming Indoor Air Quality Guidelines. No longer will funders, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, the media and researchers have to rely on vague and unsubstantiated descriptors to judge stove performance.
Kirk R. Smith University of California, Berkeley, USA. krksmith@berkeley.edu
