The carbon footprint of traditional woodfuels. Nature Climate Change, Jan 2019.
Authors: Robert Bailis, Rudi Drigo,, Adrian Ghilardi and Omar Masera
Over half of all wood harvested worldwide is used as fuel, supplying ∼9% of global primary energy. By depleting stocks of woody biomass, unsustainable harvesting can contribute to forest degradation, deforestation and climate change. However, past efforts to quantify woodfuel sustainability failed to provide credible results. We present a spatially explicit assessment of pan-tropical woodfuel supply and demand, calculate the degree to which woodfuel demand exceeds regrowth, and estimate woodfuel-related greenhouse-gas emissions for the year 2009.
We estimate 27–34% of woodfuel harvested was unsustainable, with large geographic variations. Our estimates are lower than estimates from carbon offset projects, which are probably overstating the climate benefits of improved stoves. Approximately 275 million people live in woodfuel depletion‘hotspots’—concentrated in South Asia and East Africa—where most demand is unsustainable.
Emissions from woodfuels are 1.0–1.2 Gt CO2e yr−1(1.9–2.3% of global emissions). Successful deployment and utilization of 100 million improved stoves could reduce this by 11–17%. At US$11 per tCO2e, these reductions would be worth over US$1 billion yr−1 in avoided greenhouse-gas emissions if black carbon were integrated into carbon markets. By identifying potential areas of woodfuel-driven degradationor deforestation, we inform the ongoing discussion about REDD-based approaches to climate change mitigation.
Clean, Affordable and Sustainable Cooking Energy for India: Possibilities and Realities beyond LPG, 2015.
Authors: Abhishek Jain, Poulami Choudhury, and Karthik Ganesan. Council on Energy, Environment and Water.
There is a dearth of research and studies which compare different cooking energy options,especially using a multi-dimensional approach. Thus, with the objective of promoting clean,affordable and sustainable cooking energy for all, this study analysed the potential of thealternatives, going beyond LPG. The options which were assessed include the centrally distributed commodities like LPG, PNG, electricity and the decentralised options such as biogas and improved biomass cookstoves.
A multi-criteria comparative analysis was conducted, incorporating various dimensions such as economics, fuel supply assurance,technology resilience, cooking convenience, environmental impacts, etc. The analysis utilised the existing wealth of literature and secondary data, while tapping into the knowledge and experience of technology experts through online surveys and interviews.
Experimentation in Product Evaluation: The Case of Solar Lanterns in Uganda, Africa, 2015. MIT; USAID.
Evaluating solar lanterns in Uganda
In summer 2013, a team of MIT faculty and students set off for western Uganda to conduct CITE’s evaluation of solar lanterns. Researchers conducted hundreds of surveys with consumers, suppliers, manufacturers, and nonprofits to evaluate 11 locally available solar lantern models.
To assess each product’s suitability, researchers computed a ratings score from 0 to 100 based on how the product’s attributes and features fared. “Attributes” included characteristics inherent to solar lanterns, such as brightness, run time, and time to charge.
“Features” included less-central characteristics, such as a lantern’s ability to charge a cellphone.
The importance of cellphone charging was a surprising and noteworthy finding, Sanyal says.
“One of the things that stuck with me was that [consumers] were most concerned with whether or not the solar lantern charged their cellphone. It was a feature we never expected would be so important,” Sanyal says. “For some, having connections may be more valuable than having light.”
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Field-based safety guidelines for solid fuel household cookstoves in developing countries. Energy for Sustainable Development, Volume 25, April 2015, Pages 56–66.
Authors: Nathan G. Johnsona, Kenneth M. Bryden
Highlights
- Hazard analysis of solid fuel household cookstoves used in the developing world.
- Ten safety principles for developing world household cookstoves are presented.
- Field-based testing safety protocols are developed.
- Standardized safety metrics for solid fuel cookstoves are presented.
- Low-cost safety testing kits for US$100–150 can be deployed in the field.
The burning of solid fuels for cooking creates significant adverse health, social, and economic consequences for more than three billion people worldwide. Recognizing this issue, many groups have worked to develop improved stoves that increase fuel efficiency, decrease fuel use, and reduce particulate emissions. Less attention has been given to developing a standardized process for rating cookstove safety and reducing cookstove hazards.
This paper identifies common cooking hazards and seeks to reduce cooking injuries by proposing ten field-based safety guidelines for solid fuel stoves. Each guideline describes an underlying safety principle and is accompanied by a test protocol and a metric to rate stove safety. This incremental rating system enables stove designers, donors, and consumers to track and promote stepwise safety improvements. The protocols use low-cost equipment to allow the many manufacturers of handcrafted cookstoves to assess safety without using sophisticated testing facilities and expensive equipment.
National-level differences in the adoption of environmental health technologies: a cross-border comparison from Benin and Togo. Health Policy Plan. (2015) 30 (2): 145-154.doi: 10.1093/heapol/czt106.
Authors: Kelly J Wendland, Subhrendu K Pattanayak and Erin O Sills. Corresponding author. Department of Conservation Social Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA. E-mail: kwendland@uidaho.edu
Environmental health problems such as malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhoea and malnutrition pose very high burdens on the poor rural people in much of the tropics. Recent research on key interventions—the adoption and use of relatively cheap and effective environmental health technologies—has focused primarily on the influence of demand-side household-level drivers. Relatively few studies of the promotion and use of these technologies have considered the role of contextual factors such as governance, the enabling environment and national policies because of the challenges of cross-country comparisons.
We exploit a natural experimental setting by comparing household adoption across the Benin–Togo national border that splits the Tamberma Valley in West Africa. Households across the border share the same culture, ethnicity, weather, physiographic features, livelihoods and infrastructure; however, they are located in countries at virtually opposite ends of the institutional spectrum of democratic elections, voice and accountability, effective governance and corruption.
Binary choice models and rigorous non-parametric matching estimators confirm that households in Benin are more likely than households in Togo to plant soybeans, build improved cookstoves and purchase mosquito nets, ceteris paribus. Although we cannot identify the exact mechanism for the large and significant national-level differences in technology adoption, our findings suggest that contextual institutional factors can be more important than household characteristics for technology adoption.
Field Testing of Alternative Cookstove Performance in a Rural Setting of Western India. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, Feb 2015, 12(2), 1773-1787; doi:10.3390/ijerph120201773.
Authors: Veena Muralidharan, Thomas E. Sussan, et al.
Nearly three billion people use solid fuels for cooking and heating, which leads to extremely high levels of household air pollution and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Many stove manufacturers have developed alternative cookstoves (ACSs) that are aimed at reducing emissions and fuel consumption.
Here, we tested a traditional clay chulha cookstove (TCS) and five commercially available ACSs, including both natural draft (Greenway Smart Stove, Envirofit PCS-1) and forced draft stoves (BioLite HomeStove, Philips Woodstove HD4012, and Eco-Chulha XXL), in a test kitchen in a rural village of western India. Compared to the TCS, the ACSs produced significant reductions in particulate matter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) and CO concentrations (Envirofit: 22%/16%, Greenway: 24%/42%, BioLite: 40%/35%, Philips: 66%/55% and Eco-Chulha: 61%/42%), which persisted after normalization for fuel consumption or useful energy.
PM2.5 and CO concentrations were lower for forced draft stoves than natural draft stoves. Furthermore, the Philips and Eco-Chulha units exhibited higher cooking efficiency than the TCS. Despite significant reductions in concentrations, all ACSs failed to achieve PM2.5 levels that are considered safe by the World Health Organization (ACSs: 277–714 μg/m3 or 11–28 fold higher than the WHO recommendation of 25 μg/m3).
El Salvador: Household Electrification and Indoor Air Pollution, 2015.
Authors: Manuel Barron and Maximo Torero. University of Berkely, IFPRI
This paper provides the first empirical evidence that household electrification leads to direct and substantial welfare improvements via reductions in indoor air pollution. In the setting of a recent electrification program in northern El Salvador, we exploit a unique dataset on minute-by-minute fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration within the framework of a clean experimental design.
Two years after baseline, overnight PM2.5 concentration was on average 67% lower among households that were randomly encouraged to connect compared to those that were not. This change is driven by reductions in kerosene use. As a result, the incidence of acute respiratory infections among children under 6 fell by 65% among connected households. Estimates of exposure measures suggest large health gains for all household members, but these gains are unequally distributed by gender. In addition, we show that when the electrification rate among the non-encouraged group caught up with that of the encouraged group, the effects in the former group were similar to those in the latter.
The Potential of Efficient Improved Mud-Brick Cookstove in Cameroon: An Exploratory Study, 2015.
Authors: F. H. Abanda, et al.
In most Africa countries, cooking is a dirty and time-consuming job that involves feeding some pieces of fuel such as wood, charcoal, or coal for a fire. Globally, some 500 million households with more than 70% in Africa depend on burning solid fuel to meet their cooking, heating, lighting, and other household energy needs. The wanton exploitation of wood fuel is having so many negative impacts on many households in Cameroon. Some of the impacts include: the depletion of the forest leading to environmental degradation, health impacts, etc. In the Central Africa region including Cameroon about 80-90% of the population has limited access to modern forms of energy such as electricity, and relies on traditional biomass (e.g. wood and agricultural residues) for cooking and heating. There is an urgent need to investigate more efficient cook stove technologies that have very minimal or no impact on the environment and households. In this study, an improved mud-brick cook stove was designed and tested in a typical family house in Cameroon. To ensure the acceptability and sustainability of the technology, the rural dwellers were involved in the design and implementation. The performance of the stove was compared with that of traditional 3-stone fireside common in most rural households in Cameroon. The mud-brick cook stoves are large and permanently built into a kitchen and easy to use. The mud-brick cook stove construction materials are available in communities that have clay soil and can be made using limited tools.
Benefits and Costs of the Air Pollution Targets for the Post-2015 Development Agenda, December 2014.
Marc Jeuland, Sanford School of Public Policy Duke Global Health Institute , Duke University
The assessment paper “Benefits and Costs of Air Pollution Targets for the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Post 2015 Consensus” provides an accessible entry into a problem of major global importance for both global health and environmental sustainability, that of household air pollution. It presents data on the magnitude and scope of the negative effectsof pollution from household use of solid fuels. The assessment paper then addresses some of the complications associated with specifying pollution targets in this domain, and proposes that technology-based targets (concerning specific fuels or stoves) are likely most appropriate. In line with this recommendation of appropriate targets, it closes by demonstrating the economic case for higher-efficiency cookstoves, which are receiving increasing attention and support from the global community. Indeed, replacement of traditional stoves with cleaner cooking technologies has been called “low hanging fruit”(Rosenthal 2009), in part because they would deliver a diverse set of benefits – to health and well-being, local environmental quality, and mitigation of global climate change (GACC2010, World Bank 2013).
WEBINAR: INDONESIA CLEAN STOVES INITIATIVE: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO SCALING UP CLEAN COOKING SOLUTIONS | Source: Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
Indonesia has made great strides in moving toward clean cooking solutions, beginning with the highly successful government supported Kerosene-to-LPG Conversion Program (2007–12) and the ongoing BIRU Biogas Program. However, some 24.5 million households in Indonesia continue to depend on traditional biomass as their primary cooking fuel. The momentum and lessons learned from these successful programs present a significant opportunity to promote and scale up high-quality biomass cookstoves in Indonesia.
In 2012, the World Bank, in collaboration with Indonesia’s Directorate of Bioenergy, Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (Indonesia Stove Alliance), launched the Indonesia Clean Stove Initiative (CSI). The broad aim of this initiative is to scale up access to clean cooking solutions for the 40 percent of households who will likely continue using solid fuels beyond 2030.
Join the Winrock and U.S. EPA “Indonesia Clean Stoves Initiative ” webinar on Thursday, January 15, 2015 at 9:00am Eastern Standard Time (EST) to hear results from Phase 1 and to discuss CSI’s integrated approach, using a results-based financing mechanism, to overcome supply- and demand-side barriers and institutional constraints.
About the speakers:
Ms. Christina Aristanti
Christina Aristanti is the manager of the Indonesia Stove Alliance. The Indonesia Stove Alliance is hosted by Yayasan Dian Desa, a local NGO working on appropriate technology, which has been addressing the need for clean stoves since the early 1980’s. Christina was the Asia Regional Cookstove Program (ARECOP) manager from 1991 – 2010.
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