Saving millions of lives and protecting our climate through clean cooking options

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/PR/2011/2011-11-28.html

Communications Department

PRESS RELEASE

Saving millions of lives and protecting our climate through clean cooking options

Laxenburg, Austria, 28 November 2011 – For many people in the developing world getting enough food to eat is a persistent challenge. However the challenge does not stop there. A new issue of the international journal Energy Policy details the human and environmental cost of cooking food using the only energy source available to many people, woody biomass.

The Special Issue explores the type of decision frameworks that are needed to guide policy development for clean cooking fuels and to ensure that the provision of clean energy becomes a central component of sustainable development. Additionally, it presents a research agenda and an action agenda to facilitate the development and adoption of cleaner cooking fuels and technologies and analyses why past programs to improve access to clean cooking fuels have succeeded or failed.

Universal access to clean energy is a stated goal of the United Nations and is a key entry point for reducing emissions of black carbon and other particulates - known to negatively impact the climate. The scale of the issue and opportunity to minimise emissions through adoption of clean cooking fuels and stoves was highlighted in a new report from the UN Environment Program released on Friday 25th November and will be a focus of discussions at the UNFCCC climate talks commencing in Durban today.

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The issue also refers to several significant and recent initiatives established to raise awareness and improve access to clean cooking options and explains why they may or may not succeed. One example is the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, an international program established in 2010 with a goal of equipping 100 million homes with clean cooking stoves and fuel by 2020. The program is based on the idea that carbon credits will encourage the adoption of clean cooking stoves. However, experience to date suggests that only international players with good contacts to international institutions will be able to access this money. This raises questions about how likely the program is to be adopted and persist at the community level, but also raises the more important issue of how business and the policy communities must work with communities to facilitate change.

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[msongs]

1. some solar cookers are nice but they cook small amts and take a long time nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. There can be a quick benefit from an inexpensive wood stove

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2250

08 Mar 2010: Report

World’s Pall of Black Carbon Can Be Eased With New Stoves

Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.

by jon r. luoma

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

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In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.

The Aprovecho Research Center, a nonprofit where Winiarski serves as technical director, estimates that more than 40 stove projects in many nations have since built Rocket stoves, and estimates that more than a quarter-million Rocket stoves are now being used worldwide.

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Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

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