Defining and Measuring ‘Adoption’ of Clean Cookstoves and Fuels, Lima, Peru, May 4 and 5, 2015.
How do we define and measure “adoption” of clean cookstoves and fuels?
This was the key question that brought together over 75 stakeholders from implementing agencies, carbon project developers, government ministries, NGOs, international organizations, evaluators, and research/academia in Lima, Peru on May 4 and 5.
The event, co-hosted by the Alliance, the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, the USAID Translating Research into Action (TRAction) Project, and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, focused on how to move beyond distribution and instead hone in on defining and measuring progress on adoption of clean cooking technologies. The workshop included sharing results of recent adoption studies, highlighting recently published evidence on the role of behavior change communication and gender in enabling adoption, and discussing techniques and tools for measuring stove use. Intensive working sessions focused on defining adoption and developing a practical framework for implementers to measure and evaluate the range of potential benefits that can be achieved through the adoption of clean cooking solutions.
An overarching message that emerged from the workshop was that adoption is a function of social, economic, and policy factors. Developing frameworks that take this into account will enable a better characterization of “adoption,” as well as its key drivers and determinants. In addition, ensuring sustained user acceptance is key to ensuring a thriving market for clean cookstoves and fuels. Strategies to promote behavior change at the community and individual level will be critical to success.
The Alliance will hold a public consultation period to gather further stakeholder feedback this summer. The definition and framework will be finalized at the Clean Cooking Forum 2015 in Accra, Ghana in November.
Caregiver perception of sleep-disordered breathing-associated symptoms in children of rural Andean communities above 4000 masl with chronic exposure to biomass fuel. Sleep Med. 2015 Jun;16(6):723-8. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2015.02.536.
Authors: Accinelli RA1, Llanos O2, López LM2, Matayoshi S2, Oros YP2, Kheirandish-Gozal L3, Gozal D4.
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have uncovered a very high prevalence of sleep disorders in general, and of sleep-disordered breathing in particular among children exposed to indoor biomass fuel pollution. However, despite the significant symptomatology, parents are unlikely to report these issues during health-care visits.
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether reduced caregiver perception of sleep disorders may account for the infrequent diagnosis and treatment of such problems in children residing at high altitudes and exposed to high biomass pollution.
METHODS: Parents of children aged 9-15 years of three communities residing in the Pasco region in Peru located between 3800 and 4200 meters above sea level were surveyed using a validated questionnaire instrument focused on symptoms associated with sleep-disordered breathing as well as whether caregivers perceived that their child suffered from a sleep disorder.
RESULTS: Among the 77 children included, 48.1% had nocturnal awakenings and 46.8% had repetitive movements and restless sleep. Habitual snoring was present in 33.8% of all children. However, only 10.4% of mothers considered that their children had sleep problems, and all of their children had positive answers for ≥4 sleep symptoms.
CONCLUSIONS: Children residing at high altitudes and exposed to traditional biomass-fueled stoves exhibit an extremely high frequency of sleep symptoms that are misperceived by their mothers as being “normal.” Interventions aimed at increasing parental recognition and awareness of sleep problems will be essential to foster improved diagnosis and treatment.
PM2.5 in household kitchens of Bhaktapur, Nepal, using four different cooking fuels. Atmospheric Environment 113 (2015) 159e168.
Authors: Amod K. Pokhrel, Michael N. Bates, Jiwan Achary, et al.
In studies examining the health effects of household air pollution (HAP), lack of affordable monitoring devices often precludes collection of actual air pollution data, forcing use of exposure indicators, such as type of cooking fuel used. Among the most important pollutants is fine particulate matter (PM2.5), perhaps the best single indicator of risk from smoke exposure. In this study, we deployed an affordable and robust device to monitor PM2.5 in 824 households in Bhaktapur, Nepal.
Four primary cooking fuels were used in roughly equal proportions in these households: electricity (22%), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) (29%), kerosene (23%), and biomass (26%). PM2.5 concentrations were measured in the kitchens using a light-scattering nephelometer, the UCB-PATS (University of California, Berkeley-Particle and Temperature monitoring System). The major predictors of PM2.5 concentrations in study households were investigated. The UCB-PATS results were well correlated with the gravimetric results (R2 ¼ 0.84; for all fuels combined).
The mean household PM2.5 concentrations across all seasons of the year were 656 (standard deviation (SD):924) mg/m3 from biomass; 169 (SD: 207) mg/m3 from kerosene; 101 (SD: 130) mg/m3 from LPG; and 80 (SD: 103) mg/m3 from electric stoves. In the multivariate regression of PM2.5 measures, compared with electric stoves, use of LPG, kerosene and biomass stoves were associated with increased indoor PM2.5 concentrations of 65% (95% CI: 38e95%), 146% (103e200%), and 733% (589 e907%), respectively. The UCB-PATS performed well in the field. Biomass fuel stoves without flues were the most significant sources of PM2.5, followed by kerosene and then LPG stoves. Outdoor PM2.5, and season influenced indoor PM2.5 levels. Results support careful use of inexpensive light-scattering monitors for monitoring of HAP in developing countries.
Wireless Stove Use Monitors (wSUMs) for Remotely Measuring Cookstove Usage: Vodafone Project “100 Million Stoves”Final Report: May, 2015.
Authors: Ilse Ruiz-MercadoJenny Eav, Pablo Venegas, Mayur Vaswani, Tracy Allen, Dana Charron, Kirk R. Smith
The objective of this project was to build a wireless sensor platform to verify stove use and enable smart monitoring of large-scale stove projects. The main expected market was investors and disseminators planning to tap funding in what was, at the time, a rapidly emerging carbon market in the past ten years. Expanding on previous implementations of non-wireless Stove Use Monitors (SUMs), the aim of this project was to develop a wireless version that could be deployed in a carefully selected subsample across millions of households to verify use in a statistically valid manner and provide information valuable to dissemination programs, donors, and investors.
Before the SUMs, the methods available for determining adoption dynamics and use rates were limited to standard survey methods that relied on user’s recall or observations that are often intrusive, imprecise and expensive to carry out as they require frequent visits to the households. The standard type of SUMs are small metal buttons attached to stoves to datalog temperature changes over several months. Their data had to be downloaded to a computer by physical contact (e.g. data cable) and later the data files managed and analyzed. These non-wireless SUMs provide objective, quantitative and unobtrusive measures of stove use that have themselves revolutionized understanding of stove adoption and usage. They do, however, require significant resources to analyze the data and cannot be scaled to millions because they still require household visits.
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Health and the environment: addressing the health impact of air pollution, April 2015. World Health Organization.
Excerpts – The present report describes the links between air pollution and health, and outlines some strategies for prevention, control and mitigation of the adverse effects of air pollution on health, including coordinated action between the health and other sectors.
Air pollution is one of the main avoidable causes of disease and death globally. About 4.3 million deaths each year, most in developing countries, are associated with exposure to household(indoor) air pollution. A further 3.7 million deaths a year are attributed to ambient (outdoor) air pollution.
More than half the deaths due to pneumonia in children aged under five years are attributed to household air pollution, making it a leading factor putting children’s health at risk. Cohort studies also have reported significant associations between air pollution and lung function development, respiratory infections and asthma in young children. There is also consistent evidence of the association between exposure to air pollution with birth outcomes, including low birthweight, preterm birth and small for gestational age births.
Alliance Convenes Group of Global Researchers Examining the Impacts of Clean Cooking on Children’s Health, March 2015.
How much can clean cookstoves and fuels reduce incidence of pneumonia in children?
Does using clean cooking technologies and fuels during pregnancy boost birth weights?
These were two of the many questions under discussion by 30 leading global public health researchers during a three-day meeting to discuss how clean cooking impacts children’s health. The Child Survival Workshop, co-hosted by the Alliance and Johns Hopkins University, provided experts with an opportunity to exchange lessons from the field and to take a first look at early results of ongoing research evaluating the child health benefits of clean cookstoves and fuels.
“When you get this many committed researchers together working on the same topic, there’s an incredible amount of learning taking place,” said Dr. Sola Olopade, Professor of Medicine at University of Chicago and Principal Investigator of the Nigeria research trial. “After seeing the preliminary results of the many ongoing studies, I think we’re making significant progress on how much changing to a clean cookstove or fuel can improve a child’s health.”
Dr. Darby Jack, Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is working on another of the Alliance-supported studies that seek to better understand the potential impacts of clean cookstoves and fuels on birth outcomes and child survival in Ghana. “By measuring the impact of adopting clean cooking during pregnancy on birth weight and childhood pneumonia, we’re hoping to determine how large-scale interventions that target pregnancy can improve health,” said Jack. “We hypothesize that birth weight will increase with the clean cooking interventions, and that the incidence of pneumonia will decrease in the first year of life.” Results of the study are expected by the end of the year.
The studies, underway in Ghana, Nepal and Nigeria, are some of the first in which truly clean technologies are being evaluated, and they expect to measure the magnitude of health impacts that can be attributed to higher particulate matter reductions due to clean cookstove and fuel interventions.
Building Inclusive Energy Markets – Boiling Point, Issue 65 2015.
Boiling Point ‘Building Inclusive Energy Markets’ in partnership with Guest Editors: Shell Foundation is the global practioners’ journal’s 65th issue. Articles are available online below and the full issue will shortly be available in full PDF form and in hard copy. This issue has brought together a wealth of expert knowledge and opinion on energy markets with the hard work and valuable contributions from several authors, peer reviewers and editors.
Theme Articles
- Accelerating Access to Energy: Lessons learnt from efforts to build inclusive energy markets in developing countries Authors: Karima Hirji, Richard Gomes, Shell Foundation’s (SF) report ‘Accelerating Access to Energy’, published in December 2014, outlines the independent charity’s 14 year journey to ‘create and scale new decentralised energy… [more]
- Illuminating market systems development in fragile environments: A case study of the alternative energy market in Timor Leste. Authors: David Nicholson, Emma Proud. Energy For All (E4A) was a three year market systems development (MSD) programme funded bythe European Commission. The programme sought to improve the reach and quality of distribution networks… [more]
- Innovation and Universal Energy Access. Authors: Simon Collings. The latest Shell Foundation report ‘Accelerating Access to Energy’ provides some useful lessons for the sector, particularly about the challenges of building markets for innovative solutions…. [more]
- Shell Foundation’s theory of change and lessons learnt: Commentary by Grant Ballard-Tremeer. Authors: Grant Ballard-Tremeer. A commentary on the Shell Foundation’s Theory of Change and lessons learnt from the report ‘Accelerating Access to Energy’ is provided in this article. The attention that the Shell Foundation has… [more]
- Building energy access markets: A value chain analysis of key energy market systems. Authors: Ewan Bloomfield Louise Waters, Michael Franz. To support action towards increasing access to modern energy services, in particular in Least Developed Countries (LDCs), EU Energy Initiative Partnership Dialogue Facility (EUEI PDF) and… [more]
- Rural household lighting markets: Driving the energy ‘trilemma’ to an end!. Authors: Abdel Karim Traore. Energy access has gained importance in the global development agenda, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Several delivery models have been and continue to be deployed by energy practitioners… [more]
General Articles
- Household scale peanut shell briquette production. Authors: Jessica Tryner, Jess W.Everett, Hong Zhang. The following article is a study report where briquettes were produced from peanut shells using three different methods for preparing the peanut shell material and four different devices used to… [more]
- Predicting sustained use of improved charcoal stoves in Haiti. Authors: Olivier D. C. Lefebvre, Li Wang. Once people have made the step to acquire an improved cookstove (ICS), long term sustained use is key to reaping all the potential benefits of a cleaner and more efficient stove. However evidence… [more]
Viewpoint
Toolkit
Estimation of Organic and Elemental Carbon Emitted from Wood Burning in Traditional and Improved Cookstoves Using Controlled Cooking Test. Env Sci Technol, May 2015.
Authors: Pooja Arora and Suresh Jain
Emission of various climate- and health-related pollutant species from solid biomass burning in traditional cookstoves is a global concern. Improved cookstoves serve as a possible solution to mitigate the associated impacts. However, there is a need to intensify the efforts in order to increase the data availability and promote revision of existing metrics of cookstove testing.
In this study, the effect of different phases of a cooking cycle of Northern India on emission factors of OC and EC (char and soot) was assessed for four cookstoves (advanced, improved, and traditional) using Acacia nilotica. Lowest EFs for OC (0.04 g/MJ) and EC (0.02 g/MJ) were observed in case of the forced draft cookstove; while the traditional and natural draft top feed cookstove emitted the highest OC (0.07 g/MJ) and EC (0.09 g/MJ), respectively. Variation in terms of EFs for OC and EC (char and soot) within the cooking cycle was also found to be significant.
Real-time particulate and CO concentrations from cookstoves in rural households in Udaipur, India. Env Sci Technol, May 2015.
Authors: Anna Leavey , Jessica Londeree , Pratiti Priyadarshini , Jagdeesh Puppala , Kenneth B. Schechtman , Gautam Yadama, and Pratim Biswas
Almost 3 billion people around the globe use traditional three-stone cookstoves and open fires to warm and feed themselves. The World Health Organization estimates annual mortality rates from domestic solid fuel combustion to be around 4 million. One of the most affected countries is India. Quantifying pollutant concentrations from these cookstoves during different phases of operation, and understanding the factors influencing their variability may help to identify where improvements should be targeted, enhancing indoor air quality for millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Gas and particulate measurements were collected between June-August, 2012, for 51 households using traditional cookstoves, in the villages of Udaipur district, Rajasthan, India. Mean pollutant concentrations during steady-state mode were 4989µm2cm-3, 9835µgm-3 and 18.5ppm for lung-deposited surface area, PM2.5 and CO respectively. Simple and multivariate regression analysis was conducted. Fuel amount, fuel diameter, duration of the cookstove run, roof type, and the room dimension explained between 7% and 21% of the variability for the pollutant metrics.
CO demonstrated weaker correlations with explanatory variables. Some of these variables may be indicative of socio-economic status and could be used as proxies of exposure in lieu of pollutant measurements, hence these variables may help identify which households to prioritize for intervention. Such associations should be further explored.
Wilson, D.L. et al., 2015. Comparing Cookstove Usage Measured with Sensors Versus Cell Phone-Based Surveys in Darfur, Sudan. In S. Hostettler, E. Hazbourn, & J.-C. Bolay, eds. Technologies for Development: What is Essential? New York: Springer International Publishing, pp. 211–221.
Three billion people rely on combustion of biomass to cook their food, and the resulting air pollution kills 4 million people annually. Replacing inefficient traditional stoves with “improved cookstoves” may help reduce the dangers of cooking. Therefore analysts, policy makers, and practitioners are eager to quantify adoption of improved cookstoves. In this study, we use 170 instrumented cook- stoves as well as cellphone-based surveys to measure the adoption of free-of-charge Berkeley-Darfur Stoves (BDSs) in Darfur, Sudan where roughly 34,000 BDS have been disseminated.
We estimate that at least 71 % of participants use the stove more than 10 % of days that the sensor was installed on the cookstove. Compared to sensor-measured data, surveyed participants overestimate adoption both in terms of daily hours of cooking and daily cooking events (p < 0.001). Average participants overreport daily cooking hours by 1.2 h and daily cooking events by 1.3 events. These overestimations are roughly double sensor-measured values. Data reported by participants may be erroneous due to difficulty in recollection, courtesy bias, or the desire to keep personal information obscure.
A significant portion of sensors was lost during this study, presumably due to thermal damage from the unexpected commonality of charcoal fires in the BDS; thus pointing to a potential need to redesign the stove to accommodate users’ desire to cook using multiple fuel types. The cooking event detection algorithm seems to perform well in terms of face validity, but a database of cooking logs or witnessed accounts of cooking is absent; the algorithm should be trained against expert-labeled data for the local cooking context to further refine its performance.
