Where there’s fire, there’s smoke—and for those cooking with traditional stoves fueled by wood, dung, or coal, this smoke can be deadly.
In the developing world, around 1.6 million people, mostly young children, die prematurely due to respiratory illnesses like pneumonia and lung cancer from smoke inhalation. Additionally, inefficient cookstoves emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane and aerosols such as black carbon.
On 21 September, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a partnership led by the United Nations Foundation that includes backers such as Germany, Peru, and Norway and corporations including Morgan Stanley and Shell.
The alliance intends to raise $250 million over the next ten years with the goal of developing better cookstove technology and installing 100 million cleaner-burning stoves in third world nations, said Clinton. The U.S. has already committed $50 million, with the partners providing an additional $10 million.
Though the program is a great step forward, the U.S. portion is all for applied research, says Kirk Smith, an environmental health researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “It won’t immediately create stoves on the ground,” he says.
Around half of the funds, $24.7 million, goes to the National Institute of Health to “expand epidemiologic studies and conduct clinical trials” on pulmonary and heart diseases and the relationship between indoor air pollution and low-birth weight. Additionally, $6 million and $10 million will go to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, respectively, for cookstove design innovations.
“The agencies will spend that money in their own labs so it’s not clear how much new activity this is going to generate,” says Smith.
Given the ideology of some of the partners, Smith says he worries the alliance will focus too much on free market solutions. He says any new cookstove technology needs to be affordable to people in the third world, likely through subsidization.
But Smith says he is glad to see a great deal of current interest in this problem, including national cookstove programs from the governments of Nepal, Mexico, and India, which last month announced a competition through the X Prize Foundation to develop affordable clean-burning stoves.
Image: United States Agency for International Development (USAID)