SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS KRIS BALDERSTON:
Special Representative Balderston is on foreign travel in Spain meeting with potential new public and private sector partners for the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance currently has 135 partners.
From their website:
What is a Clean Cookstove?
In a broad sense, global solutions to the health, climate, and other risks caused by the incomplete combustion of biomass in cooking stoves should meet four core criteria:
User needs: Solutions must meet the social, resource, income, and behavioral needs of users.
Scalability: Solutions must be scalable through markets or other mechanisms.
Performance: Solutions must substantially improve technology design and performance relative to baseline conditions and – once industry standards are in place, be able to meet any international standards for performance and safety.
Monitoring: Solutions must stand up to rigorous field monitoring and evaluation to demonstrate actual, in-field impacts.
Any fire creates some pollution. However, there are many fuels and advanced stoves that – at least in controlled settings – represent much cleaner solutions. These solutions might be thought of as moving along a spectrum, often referred to as the energy ladder. At one end of the spectrum is the use of raw, unprocessed solid fuels (e.g., dung, crop residues, humid wood) in open fires or crude stoves, while at the other end of the spectrum are ultra-clean fuels (e.g., natural gas, electricity, solar) or modern cooking devices like propane stoves. In the middle are a wide range of technologies and fuels of dramatically varying performance, durability, safety, and cost.
The Alliance is technology and fuel neutral, but that neutrality must be related to the performance of the solution and its ability to meet established industry standards, as well as an ability to demonstrate broad consumer acceptance to reach significant scale of operations. The Alliance will seek to advance solutions that are as clean and efficient as possible, and will actively pursue intermediate solutions that can bring about real, measurable benefits.
Different elements of the technology and fuel spectrum include: clean fuels, stove technologies, and behavioral and structural solutions.
Different delivery mechanisms for these solutions include various business models, carbon credits, government programs, and humanitarian efforts.
Clean cooking fuels offer the greatest leap in performance, but are not always available or affordable to poorer populations. The fact that they require an ongoing fuel cost in addition to an upfront cost to purchase a stove is perhaps the greatest barrier to universal adoption.
Examples of clean fuels include:
Electric Stoves
Cooking with electricity produces zero emissions within a household, and therefore is essentially smokeless from a personal exposure perspective. Emissions associated with the marginal increase in power production must also be considered (and will be more or less depending on the fuel source and emissions controls on the power plant).
One wonders where the people who are to use these electric stoves, will get the electricity to run them?
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