Nearly two million people die prematurely each and every year due to indoor air pollution, according to the World Health Organization (Full text (PDF)), virtually all in low and middle income countries. In terms of perhaps a more useful estimate of the damage caused – “disability-adjusted life years”, it’s roughly two-thirds as signficant as water, sanitation and hygiene. Most of the pollution comes from burning biomass – wood, or even worse, dung – in cooking stoves. And – you guessed it – it disproportionately affects women.
On top of that, collecting fuel for these stoves is time-consuming – taking people, mainly women, away from other activities. The deforestation for fuel obviously contributes to CO2 levels, and when smoke escapes into the wider atmosphere it contributes to global warming through black carbon.
So it’s good to see Hillary Clinton launching (and committing 50 million dollars of American funding to) the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The Alliance’s goals are summarized below:
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves envisions a world in which clean cookstoves and fuels erase this unnecessary loss of life. To jumpstart progress towards that ultimate goal, the Alliance is targeting the adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels by 100 million households by 2020. The Alliance will target the key barriers to the development of a robust commercial market for stoves including common standards, supply chain development, strong stove performance monitoring and evaluation, and consumer awareness.
The risks and costs of inefficient, dirty cooking stoves have been known for a long time. I can’t dig up a reference, but I seem to recall reading that in the late nineteeth century a campaign, mostly led by women, saw the development and widespread deployment of clean (or, at least, flued) stoves and heaters throughout the industrial world. But bringing such developments to the developing world will be challenging.
Some perspective on the issue can be found in this article by several Indian academics on an Indian program with complementary aims.
The first is that the issue is in large part one facing the rural poor. Like many of the most acute health issues facing the developing world, simply being richer will ameliorate many of them. But completely eliminating general rural poverty remains a long-term project – getting safer, more efficient stoves to the poor is something that can be done in the meantime.
The second is that while cleaner stoves have many potential benefits beyond cleaner indoor air – for one thing, they can potentially pay for themselves very quickly by freeing up time spent gathering fuel for more productive activities, many previous efforts at improving the efficiency and cleanliness of cooking stoves have failed. For instance, one idea that comes up repeatedly in this context is using solar cookers. Unfortunately, nobody uses them. As this interview with a proponent explains:
The type of food cooked is one on the main cultural issues; our food requires cooking, frying and all these can not be done with one single type of cooker.
Of course, Parabolic cooker or Scheffler’s can perform all tasks, but they are costly. In fact in Andhra, some villages are depending on Parabolic type of solar cookers for preparing tit bits for selling in the local market.
Cooking outside in the sun is not popular and in summer it would be difficult.
Most of the families, including farmers and daily laborers, prefer to cook food early in the morning, so that the members can carry food to work, and this is not possible with solar cookers. Besides eating food cooked previous day is still a taboo in villages as well.
Another important issue is the failure of solar cooker due to cloudy weather. Even if this happens on a single day, it is a big deterrent.
These were some of the cultural issues I faced some 30 years ago when I had launched solar cooker campaign. They still linger as it is very difficult to get over old habits and customs.
The global alliance, at this stage, hasn’t yet got a lot of material on their website about how they mean to tackle these issues beyond a focus on assisting the private sector rather than direct action. This should, in theory, help – if people are trying to make a quid out of selling these stoves to consumers, they’ll need to meet customer preferences if they want to stay in business. You can also make a cheap shot at the difference between the scale of the problem and the scale of the response – the $50 million in seed money constitutes roughly one quarter of the daily spend on the US military deployment to Afghanistan.
But it’s a start. Let’s hope that this effort actually goes somewhere.
UPDATE: If you’re interested in the kind of technologies that might be applied, have a look at the Ashden Awards, particularly their report on some of the issues, including barriers to adoption. Hat tip to Ken Lovell in comments.
More update: dk.au points to a post on Aidwatch which also discusses some of these issues – notably, the importance of user-centered design and good marketing.
Back in the nineties it was likewise claimed that forty or fifty $billion would allow access to fresh water. If you mulitplied this by say, three, you’d be looking at no more than a hundred and fifty $billion in this era, perhaps?
Robert’s proposal is, I’ll bet, also some thing relatively cheap that could mean so much to hundreds of millions of real battlers and be organised quickly if we had any sort of responsible world government.
I remember a doco on an east african refugee camp a few years ago. These people considered themselves prosperous if they had something as basic as a decent pot to cook their food in. They had to walk fifteen kilos to collect polluted water, carrying this back in buckets.
Yet, here in Adelaide, despite a relatively new stadium at footy park, they are spending hundreds of $millions upgrading Adelaide oval, because it’s too far for the poor dears to travel twenty minutes down the road to footy park.
Such are the priorities in what, beneath its sophisticated veneer, is actually a very rustic, primitive medieval civilisation.
Tens of millions of Filipinos cook with charcoal, plastic, wood scraps and anything else that burns because it’s all they can afford. Labour cost of gathering it isn’t an issue; any time the tide is running in the canal outside my Manila apartment I can see young children using nets, or paddling makeshift rafts, to gather fuel. The kids haven’t got anything more productive to do with their time (unless you count going to school, which is a dubious proposition).
Giving these people stoves that required either electricity or gas would be a waste of money unless somebody is also going to pay for a lifetime’s supply of energy. Even then, the stoves are likely to be sold or pawned as soon as the family needs cash for an emergency (which will be sooner rather than later).
I’m afraid the Alliance’s ‘Activities’ page demonstrates little awareness of the practical aspects of its laudable objectives. They all sound like lots of top-down meetings and report-writing to me:
The only effective way of tackling the problem is surely to help alleviate poverty. The only people who cook on charcoal for fun are affluent Westerners. Poor people would love to invest in an LPG stove if only they could afford the fuel (to put the matter in perspective, a two burner LPG stove in Manila costs much less than an 11 kg gas cylinder, which would probably need to be replaced every three months by the average family).
Ken, one of the major ideas is that they continue burning whatever junk they get their hands on, but they burn it in a much more efficient stove.
Robert I can see the potential for that although space might be an issue. My partner’s family cooks on a section of small concrete pipe sitting on its end with a hole in the side and the pot of rice on top. There are 11 people in a two room squat. Finding room for anything substantial that couldn’t be moved around easily would be a problem. Maybe suitable technology is available, I wouldn’t know. None of the Alliance’s listed activities seems to cover research and development of the stoves themselves.
Maybe this is the sort of thing they have in mind, although the benefits are more incremental than revolutionary. The new, more efficient stoves cost three times more than the traditional ones but people allegedly understand they are worth the cost. Well the ones interviewed in the video do, but I wonder if the same applies to millions of other Cambodians.
Yes the wood gas stoves are available, are low cost, and can burn pretty much most combustible materials – efficiently.
Have a look at:
http://www.woodgas.com/woodcooking.htm
No material interests to declare, just a proud owner of one!
Have a look at the report I linked to – you can get pretty good improvements just from more efficient combustion, and a gasifier stove really does wonders (but is more expensive).
One of the interesting observations is that the best approach might not be local production – mass production in China works well for stoves as well, particularly as the quality requirements are pretty exacting.
Another thing is that “social marketing” is important, including convincing opinion leaders of the value of the products. If you want something to be adopted, make sure you convince the cool kids. The developing world is not so different after all
Aidee that looks very cool. Do they ship to Australia?
Rocket stoves maybe?
(2008 PDF) Evaluation of the costs and benefits of
interventions to reduce indoor air pollution
There are also the human waste bio-fuel tanks where 3 benefits accrue.
Human waste [and animal] is removed hygenically, gas is created which can be bottled on site and walked to the houses easily and compost is created for the fields.
I’ve seen a site that has a simple low tech small area tank/ toilet system close to human habitation [obviously] design which some mob are trying to get built in villages and small towns in Asia and Africa.
These, plus an efficient gas burner are supposedly very efficient for village needs.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/26/news/international/kahn_biogas.fortune/index.htm
Something like this.
Indeed, rdb.
I believe they’re the “low cost” option alluded to in some of the discussion. Gasifiers are the “high cost” option.
All fine and good,but has the problem been actually attempted to be solved in those countries themselves receiving these!? I mistrust anything the Clintons go near.Mud built stoves have been a hallmark of the organic and permaculturally inclined for sometime.Even a homemade pizza system built on a car trailer was on one of the covers of either Earth Garden or Grass Roots.The problem of biomass being used,could I believe be solved a number of ways,including growing more acceptable biomass on trees and growing multi-use trees,as has always been the permaculture design principle.I actually think animal fats or vegetable based fats will suppress rising dark carbon,as in the traditional means of Australian Aboriginal cooking.Perhaps these stoves,mentioned in PDFform, could be used also for manufacturing,and could be designed to further increase heat by some sort of inserts.In the mean time all the various cooking methods need to reduce the smoke content.Perhaps old salty[salt..preferably sea salt] could be the answer,as even the Rodale Press had in one of its books,and used in welding in the past.Just flick a bit of salt on the fire,and then I guess avoiding perhaps sodium.Although a salt based stove could be experimented with.
Many years ago I listened to a conference presentation at Melb Uni by an Indian professor about just this subject.
He made an entirely convincing case that the most cost effective thing they could do was to bring really basic electricity to the very poorest homes in his state. His statistics showed that cooking accidents (burns) and respiratory disease basically disappeared from the regions where this policy was implemented. The general health of the population in the the trial area was massively improved.
IMV fiddling with stoves is simply another manifestation of imperial arrogance masquerading as humanitarian concern.
The professors paper also showed that the payback interms of reduced need for health services improved productivity etc was only a few years.
Huggy
etc.
http://aidwatchers.com/2010/09/what-hillary%E2%80%99s-cookstoves-need-to-succeed/