The US. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently annouunced the international priorities of the the agency to include a focus on reducing black carbon through cookstoves. Among the six priorities outlined by the EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson was the priority on "Combating Climate Change by Limiting Pollutants."
The EPA says that while it has has taken important steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at home, but the global challenge of climate change requires a global solution. "To make significant progress in reducing the effects of climate change, pollution must be cut throughout the world. EPA will promote global strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants such as methane from landfills and black carbon from cookstoves. These pollutants are damaging especially vulnerable regions such as the Himalayan glaciers and the Arctic."
The announcement was made at a meeting of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Guanajuato, Mexico.
“Pollution doesn’t stop at international borders, and neither can our environmental and health protections. The local and national environmental issues of the past are now global challenges,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.
The world of cook stoves is changing as companies are stepping forward to market models that are efficient and durable while micro-finance and other initiatives are likely to make them affordable as well, says an article in the Newsweek.
According to the magazine, "When it comes to fighting global warming, much of the world’s attention has focused on ways to eliminate coal-fired power plants, promote electric vehicles, and build wind farms. But what if there were something far simpler and more low-tech that would have the same benefit as taking more than half the cars in the United States off the road? Well, it turns out there is—which is why everyone from the US Congress to the United Nations and the philanthropic wing of Shell Oil is suddenly talking about cookstoves."
Newsweek points out that converting most of the world’s poor to more efficient stoves would do as much to prevent global warming as taking 134 million cars off the streets which is why building better stoves—and finding a way to persuade the poor to use them—has become a priority.
The energy bill passed by the U.S. Senate in May calls for the government to help distribute stoves. A similar bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 even mandated that 20 million homes be provided with better stoves within five years.
However, the article points out the challenges which have existed in tackling the issue and what possibly makes the efforts to deal with indoor air pollution different this time is the creation of enterprises around marketing of improved cook stoves.
Says Newsweek, "The history of cookstoves, however, is one of a succession of well-intentioned failures. India paid tens of millions of dollars to supply stoves to rural villages between 1984 and 2004. But the government stoves were of poor quality and, because they were given away, there was no natural after-market for servicing them. As a result, within a few years the vast majority were no longer in use.
Many, though, think this time will be different. A handful of private companies have decided there is money to be made in stoves, and they are marketing models that are efficient, durable, and priced between $25 and $100. That’s still too costly for many of the world’s poorest. Experts say the price has to drop below $12 for guaranteed widespread adoption. But some are hoping that the growing ranks of microfinance banks will be persuaded to lend money to villagers to bridge this gap, or that Western companies might be persuaded to finance distribution in exchange for carbon-trading credits. The U.N. Foundation also plans to launch a Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in September. But it remains unclear whether enough of the world’s poor can be persuaded to change the way they cook in time to keep the entire planet from roasting."
A reduction in soot output would start slowing the pace of global warming almost immediately given the magnitude of soot's contribution and the fact that it lingers in the atmosphere for only a few weeks before being washed out, says a new Stanford study.
According to author of the study, Mark Z Jacobson, director of Stanford's atmopshere/Energy program, the quickest and best way to slow the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is to reduce soot emissions from the burning of fossil fuel, wood and dung.
His analysis shows that soot is second only to carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming. But, he said, climate models to date have mischaracterized the effects of soot in the atmosphere.
Because of that, soot's contribution to global warming has been ignored in national and international global warming policy legislation, he said.
"Controlling soot may be the only method of significantly slowing Arctic warming within the next two decades," says Jacobson in a report in Stanford News, "We have to start taking its effects into account in planning our mitigation efforts, and the sooner we start making changes, the better."
To reach his conclusions, Jacobson used an intricate computer model of global climate, air pollution and weather that he developed over the last 20 years that includes atmospheric processes not incorporated in previous models.
He examined the effects of soot – black and brown particles that absorb solar radiation – from two types of sources. He analyzed the impacts of soot from fossil fuels – diesel, coal, gasoline, jet fuel – and from solid biofuels, such as wood, manure, dung and other biomass used for home heating and cooking in many locations. He also focused in detail on the effects of soot on heating clouds, snow and ice.
What he found was that the combination of both types of soot is the second-leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. That ranks the effects of soot ahead of methane, an important greenhouse gas.
In a BBC Radio 4 Program "Rethinking Climate Change" in the series "Costing the Earth", a spectrum of scientists and climate change activists discuss the Hartwell report which says that we need to start afresh if we are to have any hope of success.
These scientists point out the obvious failure to reach multi-national agreements on curbing emissions. Future strategy, they say, should be led by individual groups, governments and temporary alliances. Efforts should focus on practical solutions that bring other benefits alongside emission-control. If a strategy brings about poverty reduction or economic renewal then it is much more likely to attract widespread support than any programme labelled as 'anti-climate change'.
This group of scientists argues that the focus on carbon dioxide has been mis-guided from the start. They estimate that more than half of man-made warming can be attributed to sources other than the burning of coal, gas and oil, and most of those emissions are easier to reduce. We should tackle black soot, reactive nitrogen and methane before we make the kind of tough decisions needed to fight carbon dioxide.
In 'Costing the Earth' Tom Heap conducts a thorough examination of the new approach with experts including author Bjorn Lomborg, the UN's Yvo de Boer and climate negotiators from Oxfam and WWF. He asks if it's right to abandon all the efforts made over the last decade. Can we really save the planet without every major nation signed up to the same plan? Shell Foundations's Simon Bishop also talks in the program about improved cookstoves and the contribution it can make to reducing black soot.
A path breaking model of “stove use monitoring system” (SUMS) developed by UC Berkeley was awarded a first prize of $300,000 in the 2010 Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project. The Foundation selects three wireless projects,with the potential to save lives and solve critical global challenges. The winners were selected from more than 100 qualified applications from universities and NGOs from across the United States of America.
The "100 Million Stoves" device is a simple wireless SUMS, powered with the excess heat of the stove, which can be attached to the millions of new low-emission stoves being used in developing regions. The device will record usage data and send them to a dedicated reader carried by someone in the village making a monthly walk through. The cumulated data will then be uploaded via cell phone to a central database for systematic processing. The low-cost technology will allow the assessment of household energy programs, enable feedback from users, and provide transparent verification of carbon credits.
According to Kirk. R. Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health, UC Berkeley, "The wireless SUMS can be deployed in a careful sub-sample across millions of households in a statistically valid manner. Unlike household visits, the monitors provide unique and valuable information that can be scaled to millions."
The "100 Million Stoves" team consists of Smith's research group, three small Berkeley companies — BioLite, Electronically Monitoring Ecosystems, and Berkeley Air Monitoring Group — and the Department of Environmental Health Engineering at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, India. Together they have built prototypes of the wireless SUMS, and the Vodafone award will help bring the project to the next stage of implementation and scale. The team plans to use the device in trials and its initial application will be in India as part of the country's National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.
"Soon it will be ready for use by groups around the world wishing to validate carbon credits for stove programs on the international carbon market. In addition, it can also serve as the basis for other devices to remotely and efficiently monitor the use and effectiveness of household health and energy interventions for research, program evaluation, and user feedback.", says Professor Smith.
There seem to be many a scientific proponent of the premise that the increasingly erratic monsoons in the subcontinent have a correlation with Black Carbon (soot) from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Oceanographer, writer, Danielle Meitiv captures the scientific work done so far in her blog.
Says Danielle, pollutants, particularly black carbon (BC), are affecting the monsoons by a process that starts in the winter when soot combines with dust blown from the west, creating huge clouds of haze that hug the southern slopes of the Himalayas.
Danielle explains, "The BC in these clouds absorb solar radiation, warming the air even faster than usual. This draws more moisture to the region sooner, causing the early monsoon to intensify. This theory is known as the Elevated Heat Pump, as the soot acts to pump heat up the Himalayan slopes. Observations show a widespread and sustained warming in the pre-monsoon season over the last three decades. In that same time period, early monsoon rainfall has increased by 20% ."
"Over the oceans, BC has a different, although equally damaging effect. BC combines with other anthropogenic aerosols, forming Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), large plumes of particles that can stretch over whole continents or ocean basins. These ABCs absorb solar radiation in the atmosphere, causing dimming below. This reduction of irradiance reduces evaporation and cools the surface, leading to a weakening of the later monsoon."
"The combined impact of these two phenomena, the Elevated Heat Pump and Solar Dimming, increases flooding during the early months of monsoon, and causes drought later on. Some studies suggest that over time the result will be an overall weakening of the monsoon and a reduction of rainfall over the region. Reduction in rainfall of great concern because in South Asia there is a strong positive correlation between the amount of precipitation and food production. The Indian summer monsoon is the biggest source of freshwater to the region: over 70% of the annual precipitation over India occurs during the summer monsoon."
For as little as three dollars, stoves can save lives, mitigate climate change and reduce deforestation in developing countries.
Nearly half the world’s households, around three billion people worldwide, eat food cooked on traditional stoves and fires that kill around 1.6 million people a year-most of them children. A new report says that a global programme to produce half a billion improved stoves could convert the world’s poor to safer cooking, save hundreds of thousands of young lives a year, and at the same time cut global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of up to one billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
The report, ‘Stoking up a cookstove revolution: the secret weapon against poverty and climate change’ published by the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, gives many examples of stoves programmes across the developing world that provide affordable, robust ‘improved’ stoves that burn less fuel, cook faster and approximately halve harmful smoke emissions.
Many use a chimney to remove smoke and gases from the kitchen, improving combustion.“Efficient stoves are the most direct and affordable way to address climate change, but we need millions and millions of them,” says Dean Still, director of Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon, USA. There are still hurdles to overcome, says the report. Each improved stove must be designed for local cooking practices and diets and studies show that cultural patterns sometimes prevent their easy acceptance and adoption.
According to the Ashden Awards it is essential to use social marketing and education to introduce the stoves sensitively and ensure they are designed according to local cooks’ needs and preferences. Many clean stoves are designed by social entrepreneurs for local manufacture, and non governmental organisations usually provide training to ensure they meet quality standards. Grameen Shakti in Bangladesh, for example, trains local technicians who build stoves in people’s homes, aiming to provide 10 million stoves in this way by 2015.
Substantial investment and support is needed to reach the half billion people who need efficient stoves. The report suggests that the carbon market can play a useful role in stove programme investment: “We calculate that improved cooking stoves can keep a tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere for as little as $1 to $3 – an exceedingly good deal in a market where offsets can be sold for $20 to 30 a tonne,” says Fred Pearce, author of the report.
“We think the time has come for greater finance and political will to roll out stoves. Just as donors have grasped the value of rolling out bed-nets against malaria, we want to see improved stoves make a real impact on the poor. Better stoves improve health, save lives, help mitigate the effects of climate change while also saving money,” says Sarah Butler-Sloss founder director of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy.
E+Co, a non governmental organisation based in Tanzania announced plans to introduce new cooking stoves in Tanzania in a mission to reduce indoor air pollution and greenhouse gases.
At a stakeholders meeting in Dar es Salaam held by the NGO, manager Erick Wurster said the project is meant to curb deforestation and improve air quality by manufacturing or importing charcoal and wood fuel efficient biomass stoves.
Mr Wurster explained that according to World Health Organisation (WHO), it is estimated that 27,000 deaths occur every year in Tanzania from firewood and charcoal stoves and destroying an average of 121,000 hectares of forests.
He said that air pollution from cooking with solid fuel on primitive stoves was a key risk factor in childhood acute respiratory infections such as pneumonia as well as many other respiratory, cardiovascular and ocular diseases.
He said the problem is set to amplify given that more than 95 per cent of Tanzania's population relies on dangerous and inefficient cooking fuel.
Mr Wurster said that the new technology will include `Envirofit stoves' and `Quality Jiko' to be imported from China. Later, he said, Tanzanians would be trained on how to manufacture the stoves locally. He said after introduction of the stoves, the project will extend to water filtration systems, replacing the need to boil water using firewood.
Black carbon soot, produced from incomplete combustion of diesel fuel and biomass, is one of the largest contributors to climate change apart from CO2 and should be a prime target of policymakers according to scientists and experts testifying at a hearing of the US House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming chaired by Congressman Edward Markey.
“Black carbon packs a powerful punch when it comes to climate change, absorbing solar radiation while in the atmosphere and also darkening the surfaces of snow and ice, contributing to increased melting in vulnerable regions such as the Arctic and Himalayas,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD).
“The good news is that it only stays in the atmosphere for up to a few weeks, making it an ideal target for achieving fast cooling through aggressive mitigation measures.”Reducing black carbon emissions and other short-term climate forcers such as HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone can serve as a complement to CO2 reduction measures, which can take up to 1,000 years to produce significant cooling because of CO2’s long atmospheric lifetime.
“A drastic reduction in BC has the potential of offsetting CO2-induced warming for a decade or two. Effectively, BC reduction may provide a possible mechanism for buying time to develop and implement effective steps for reducing CO2 emissions,” said Dr V. Ramanathan from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in his written testimony. Because developed countries have been successful in reducing black carbon emissions in recent years, the technology exists to help developing countries, such as China and India, significantly cut their soot emissions, through diesel-particulate filters for vehicles and cleaner-burning cookstoves.
Dr Ramanathan has spearheaded the Project Surya programme to bring solar cookstoves to India to assist in gathering additional data on the climate forcing potential of black carbon and its impact on local health – emissions of black carbon contribute to respiratory illness, the fourth leading cause of excess mortality in developing countries.
“Policymakers are beginning to take note of black carbon and other short-term climate forcers like HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone, where emissions reductions are cost-effective and can yield major climate and health benefits,” added Zaelke. “These 'fast-action' strategies are low-hanging fruits that need to be picked now to avoid the dangerous near-term consequences of abrupt climate change.”
As India's improved cook stoves program gains traction as a result of the efforts of government, stove manufacturers, global foundations and NGOs, the issue is getting focussed on a few basic challenges : Selling the Idea, Finding the Funds, Providing the Support, says a report "Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves" by Tina Adler in Environmental Health Perspectives.
According to Adler's report, the main objective of Indian consumers who purchase an improved cook stove is often quite different from the Indian government’s reason for promoting stoves. The government wants to improve the health of rural Indians. “But people buy [stoves] more for aspirational reasons,” says Mahesh Yagnaraman, CEO and managing director of First Energy. The energy-efficient stoves burn less, or burn different fuels, so women and children spend less time gathering solid fuel. As part of its original sales campaign, First Energy had doctors test the breathing capacity of interested customers to demonstrate how the old stoves had harmed their lungs. But instead of wanting a new stove, the prospective customers “just wanted medicine,” Yagnaraman says.
To sell stoves, you have to explain how the stoves save time and fuel and don’t dirty the kitchen with soot, says Anchan. Selling improved stoves is “very difficult,” he says. Consumers know the smoke irritates their eyes and makes them cough, but they don’t always comprehend the long-term impact of breathing high levels of smoke.
Customers “don’t trust any of these [stove] solutions very easily,” says Yagnaraman. No stove is entirely reliable, so some families will keep more than one type of stove in their homes, he says. Usage studies show that families cook at most about 70% of their meals on their improved cook stove, says Smith. In their studies, he and his colleagues attach microchip usage monitors to stoves instead of relying on self-reports from the family members. “If you ask people, they say, ‘Oh yes, we love it, we use it all the time,’” Smith says.
Significant customer support is key to any cook stove program’s success, experts say. “You can’t drop a stove into a household and walk away,” notes Rita Colwell, a public health expert at the University of Maryland at College Park and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Envirofit provides that hands-on care, Anchan says. In addition to training customers how to use the stove and providing them with a manual, Envirofit calls customers to see how the stove is working for them.
Equally compelling is the issue of working up an industry where the cook stoves actually make a significant difference. Notes Adler, data from studies such as RESPIRE will help answer an important question facing clean-stove advocates and public health experts: how much must concentrations of smoke in homes be reduced in order to improve families’ health? When tested in the field, few of the improved cook stoves used in India achieve more than a 50–60% reduction in indoor air pollution levels and a 50% reduction in fuel use, says Simon Bishop, policy and communications manager at the Shell Foundation, which promotes improved cook stoves as a primary solution to indoor air pollution.
The first master of public health (M.P.H.) program in occupational and environmental health (OEH) ever offered in India was officially launched January 19, 2010, by Sri Ramachandra University (SRU) in collaboration with UC Berkeley.
India suffers from a tremendous shortage of trained professionals and inadequate capacity for research in OEHS. Advanced training in this field is very limited in India and does not meet the growing demand for professionals in areas such as occupational safety, indoor air pollution control, and water quality assessment in a nation that houses more than 1.1 billion people.
Establishing such a program was a key objective of the SRU-Berkeley Inter-Institutional Collaboration, which was initiated in 2002 with support from the NIH Fogarty International Center. Professor Kirk R. Smith of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Professor Kalpana Balakrishnan of SRU serve as principal investigators in this initiative to build capacity for research and training in environmental health in India.
For one-sixth of the human race living with a range of occupational and health risks, this is truly a milestone, says Smith. Advancing the field of environmental health in India will lead to improved lives and better environmental outcomes.
In addition to developing and launching the OEH degree program, faculty members from UC Berkeley and SRU have also collaborated on joint research projects and publications. Six faculty members from SRU have spent one to two semesters each at UC Berkeley taking semester long courses in areas of environmental health. UC Berkeley faculty and members of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health have been instrumental in the SRU faculty training.
Smith and UC Berkeley School of Public Health Dean Stephen Shortell attended the day-long program in Chennai, India, celebrating the launch of the landmark program. Shortell gave a CME lecture on chronic illness management and its implications for India. Smith also delivered a lecture following the ceremony, Mitigating climate, meeting MDGs, and moderating chronic disease: the health co-benefits landscape for household energy.
The project spearheaded by TWP works in partnership with local NGOs and self help groups in order to distribute fuel efficient cook stoves in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua.
TWP has helped in providing and building more than 35,000 stoves which has benefited more than 175,000 people so far.
TWP offers a variety of stove models to meet the needs of different communities while conserving trees and decreasing emissions from deforestation. The Justa Stove burns 70% less wood, saving families between US$1 - $5 per day. They also decrease harmful carbon emissions by 1 tonne CO2 equivalent per year per stove for domestic users and 3.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent per year for commercial users, such as tortilla makers.
In order to supplement the trees used in the fuel-efficient stoves, the project also includes reforestation efforts to sequester carbon and counter the effects of deforestation. TWP has assisted in the creation of 16 community-run nurseries that produce 650,000 trees each year. TWP’s reforestation efforts have led to the planting of three million trees to date throughout Latin America.
The accolade also includes $200,000 which TWP will use in supporting and expanding the fuel efficient stove projects and nurseries across indoor air pollution affected countries that include Central America and the Caribbean as well as purchasing necessary equipment and materials which will help in boosting the production of smoke less cook stoves.
Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab led by atmospheric scientist Surabhi Menon have taken a further step in making the linkage between black carbon or soot and glacier melting.
A Berkley Lab report says Previous studies have shown that black carbon can have a powerful effect on local atmospheric temperature. “Black carbon can be very strong,” Menon says. “A small amount of black carbon tends to be more potent than the same mass of sulfate or other aerosols.”
Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers.
“Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt,” says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “Most of the change in snow and ice cover—about 90 percent—is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum.”
Menon and her collaborators used two sets of aerosol inventories by Indian researchers to run their simulations; their results were published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
According to the report, Black carbon, which is caused by incomplete combustion, is especially prevalent in India and China; satellite images clearly show that its levels there have climbed dramatically in the last few decades. The main reason for the increase is the accelerated economic activity in India and China over the last 20 years; top sources of black carbon include shipping, vehicle emissions, coal burning and inefficient stoves. According to Menon’s data, black carbon emitted in India increased by 46 percent from 1990 to 2000 and by another 51 percent from 2000 to 2010.
However, black carbon’s effect on snow is not linear. Menon’s simulations show that snow and ice cover over the Himalayas declined an average of about one percent from 1990 to 2000 due to aerosols that originated from India. Her study did not include particles that may have originated from China, also known to be a large source of black carbon.
Black soot deposited on Tibetan glaciers has contributed significantly to the retreat of the world’s largest non-polar ice masses, according to new research by scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Soot absorbs incoming solar radiation and can speed glacial melting when deposited on snow in sufficient quantities. (Pic: To better understand the role that black soot has on glaciers, researchers trekked high into the Himalayas to collect ice cores that contain a record of soot deposition that spans back to the 1950s. Credit: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Researchers led by Baiqing Xu of the Chinese Academy drilled and analyzed five ice cores from various locations across the Tibetan Plateau, looking for black carbon (a key component of soot) as well as organic carbon. The cores support the hypothesis that black soot amounts in the Himalayan glaciers correlate with black carbon emissions in Europe and South Asia.
Temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau -- sometimes called Earth's "third pole" -- have warmed by 0.3°C (0.5°F) per decade over the past 30 years, about twice the rate of observed global temperature increases. New field research and ongoing quantitative modeling suggests that soot's warming influence on Tibetan glaciers could rival that of greenhouse gases.
At Zuoqiupu glacier -- a bellwether site on the southern edge of the plateau and downwind from the Indian subcontinent -- black soot deposition increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2003. The rise in soot levels at Zuoqiupu follows a dip that followed the enacting of clean air regulations in Europe in the 1970s.
Most soot in the region comes from diesel engines, coal-fired power plants, and outdoor cooking stoves. Many industrial processes produce both black carbon and organic carbon, but often in different proportions. Burning diesel fuel produces mainly black carbon, for example, while burning wood produces mainly organic carbon. Since black carbon is darker and absorbs more radiation, it’s thought to have a stronger warming effect than organic carbon.
"Tibet's glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate," said James Hansen, coauthor of the study and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City. "Black soot is probably responsible for as much as half of the glacial melt, and greenhouse gases are responsible for the rest."
The study was published December 7th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Fifty percent of the glaciers were retreating from 1950 to 1980 in the Tibetan region; that rose to 95 percent in the early 21st century," said Tandong Yao, director of the Chinese Academy's Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research. Some glaciers are retreating so quickly that they could disappear by mid-century if current trends continue, the researchers suggest.
Since melt water from Tibetan glaciers replenishes many of Asia’s major rivers -- including the Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Brahmaputra -- such losses could have a profound impact on the billion people who rely on the rivers for fresh water. While rain and snow would still help replenish Asian rivers in the absence of glaciers, the change could hamper efforts to manage seasonal water resources by altering when fresh water supplies are available in areas already prone to water shortages.
The Government of India today pushed the button on an aggressive cookstoves program. The Times of India reported that Once completely rolled out the full-scale programme would target 135-140 million households nationwide that still depend on burning wood, twigs, leaves and agriculture residues for heating and cooking needs. (LEFT: The Union Minister of New and Renewable Energy, Dr. Farooq Abdullah addressing at the Launch of ‘National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative’ in New Delhi on December 02, 2009)
Following is the full text of the Press Release on Launching of the ‘National Biomass Cookstove Initiative’ on 2nd December 2009 at New Delhi
A New Initiative on Improved Biomass Cookstoves
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) is launching a new initiative on biomass cookstoves, with the primary aim of enhancing the availability of clean and efficient energy for the energy deficient and poorer sections of our society.
A large section of our country’s population – 75% of the rural households and 22% of the urban households, according to the National Sample Survey’s 61st survey -- still uses biomass for its cooking needs. An estimated 80% of the residential energy in India comes from biomass, much of it burnt in traditional chulhas. The adverse health and socio-economic implications of this form of energy supply are enormous, with women and children at particular risk. The burden of biomass fuel collection and processing for cooking also falls mainly upon women and children (mainly girls), who spend significant time gathering fuel resources every day.
Therefore, providing a clean cooking energy option for these households will yield enormous gains in terms of health and socio-economic welfare of the weakest and the most vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, the cleaner combustion in these devices will greatly reduce the products of incomplete combustion which are greenhouse pollutants, thus helping combat climate change.
This initiative of MNRE is envisaged to be structured differently from the earlier National Programme on Improved Chulhas, although it will build on the several successes of that programme while also drawing lessons from the experience gained from its implementation.
The starting point of the current exercise is the user. The solution on offer should, first and foremost, be easy to use and maintain and conform to local cooking habits across the country. Its adoption must make economic sense to the household. The programme is conceived not as a handout to poorer households, but rather as an economically sustainable business solution. As the Prime Minister of India has often said, we need to make the poor of this country bankable.
This new initiative is also based on the recognition that cookstove technology has improved considerably in the past few years. But further advances are still possible and, indeed essential. Our aim is to achieve quality of energy services from cookstoves comparable to that from other clean energy sources such as LPG.
MNRE has held several brainstorming sessions and consultations over the past few months with a range of stakeholders and experts from civil society, academia, business, and government to develop an understanding of current activities and future potential of such a programme. The Prime Minister’s Office has been closely associated with these deliberations.
Under this Initiative a series of pilot-scale projects are envisaged using several existing commercially-available and better cookstoves and different grades of processed biomass fuels. This will help in exploring a range of technology deployment, biomass processing, and delivery models leveraging public-private partnerships.
At the same time, it will set in motion a series of activities that are designed to develop the next-generation of household cookstoves, biomass-processing technologies, and deployment models. This may include an innovative global contest to develop combustion units with high thermal efficiency and low pollution characteristics and, in parallel, appropriate biomass-processing devices The Initiative will aim for a significant enhancement of technical capacity in the country by setting up state-of-the-art testing, certification and monitoring facilities and strengthening R&D programmes in key technical institutions. An independent monitoring and evaluation component is envisaged to assess the activities and fine-tune them on an ongoing basis. And, last but not the least, it will welcome and promote participation by civil society and private actors to make it a true public-private partnership.
MNRE also believes that the technologies and delivery models that will be developed through this Initiative will be useful for other developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose populations also suffer from health and other problems related to biomass use in household cooking. Therefore success of this Initiative could well have a transformative impact not only for our own citizens but also for the energy poor in other developing countries.
If India were to put out 150 million improved biomass stoves each year for a decade, by 2020, the total number of averted premature deaths from acute lower respiratory infections will have reached about 240 000 children aged younger than 5 years, and more than 1·8 million premature adult deaths from ischaemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will have been averted, so says a Lancet paper, one of a series of six.
The paper is a part of a Health and Climate Change series titled "Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: household energy" and is co-authored by Paul Wilkinson, Kirk R Smith, Michael Davies, Heather Adair, Ben G Armstrong, Mark Barrett, Nigel Bruce, Andy Haines, Ian Hamilton, Tadj Oreszczyn, Ian Ridley, Cathryn Tonne and Zaid Chalabi.
The paper states: "For India, we specified a 10-year programme to introduce 150 million low-emissions household cook-stoves. This scenario was chosen because of the major public health burden that is associated with indoor air pollution from inefficient burning of biomass fuels in India and in many other low-income countries. It is also consistent with proposals that are being considered in India. The cost would be less than $50 every 5 years, perhaps paid partly through government subsidy and partly by the households because of fuel cost savings and time savings in harvesting of fuel. The scenario used here draws lessons from the previous Indian national stove programme, the National Programme for Improved Chullhas,13 which, like the major national programme in China,14 was initiated in the early 1980s and focused mainly on increasing fuel efficiency to assist with rural welfare and, to a lesser extent, protect forests. Secondary emphasis was on reduction of smoke exposure through use of chimneys, and there was no consideration of outdoor pollution or climate. However, there have been major changes in our understanding about the value of and technology for emissions reductions and in world conditions that have modified the landscape for improved biomass stove programmes."
"The changes in health related to traditional fuel use patterns are much better established than they were previously, with hundreds of reports documenting the associated health outcomes. An estimated 400 000 pre-mature deaths per year in India are caused by biomass-fuel use in households.9 The international price of liquified petroleum gas, which is the major alternative clean household fuel, will probably continue to increase faster than will rural incomes, making the transition to modern fuels difficult and, if subsidised by government,increasingly expensive for national budgets. This situation adds to the attraction of deployment of advanced biomass stoves that provide high performance, use local renewable resources, and relieve the government of the cost of fuel subsidies. Climate change is a major threat and household fuel combustion is an important contributor, especially to black carbon, with high greenhouse effects per unit energy delivered compared with many other human uses of energy, depending on the relative weighting of the climate-active pollutants emitted."
The paper argues that if 15 million stoves are given out each year, at the end of the decade, 87% of Indian households would have clean combustion, either through graduating on their own to clean fuels or receiving advanced biomass stoves as part of the intervention.
By 2020, the total number of averted premature deaths from acute lower respiratory infections will have reached about 240 000 children aged younger than 5 years, and more than 1·8 million premature adult deaths from ischaemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will have been averted. The paper claims that overall, the national burden of disease in 2020 from these three major diseases would be about a sixth lower than it would have been without the stove programme—which is equivalent to elimination of nearly half the entire cancer burden in India in 2020.
One of the major, albeit contentious, connections has been between black carbon and climate change with an equal weightage to the belief that black carbon does, or not, have a precipitous impact. Where some have seen hope in the ability to tackle black carbon better and faster, other scientists are sceptical that it may just take our eyes of what really needs to be done on climate change, namely bring down CO2 emissions.
There has been much discussion in the Indian press on a discussion paper put out by the Ministry of Environment that argued that global warming cannot be simply assessed by adding up all emissions and tracking glacier meltdowns.
The TIME Magazine puts out a widely read piece which squarely lines up Black Carbon as the number 2 contributor to climate change. "The world could think that we just cut CO2 and the problem is solved and we all go home, but it's not," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climatologist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an expert on black carbon says in TIME. "That's my nightmare."
"Black carbon in the air actually absorbs sunlight as it comes from space, directly heating up the atmosphere. "The soot particles are like the parts of a blanket, and it's getting thicker," says Ramanathan. "The smoke absorbs sunlight and heats the blanket directly."
All of this has particular importance for developing Asian countries, especially India, where a mix of development means that biomass-burning and diesel combustion remains prominent. Black carbon is already having an impact on the ice atop the Himalayas, the massive glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia when they melt each spring. Thanks to global warming, these glaciers are receding, threatening the long-term water supplies for the region. Ramanathan, Wilcox and an Indian glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain are working to figure out the impact of black carbon on glacial loss. Beyond warming the atmosphere, black carbon can also speed the melting of glaciers by literally turning them black — soot on snow makes the ice heat up faster. "When black carbon falls on the snow, it darkens it," says Ramanathan. "If the snow is white, it reflects 80% of the sunshine, but with black carbon it absorbs the sunlight."
The good news is that while taking CO2 out of our energy cycle has proven very difficult — especially in poorer developing nations — black-carbon emissions should be easier to curb. Reducing deforestation will help — the burning of tropical rain forests is a big contributor to the black-carbon load.
On the other hand, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests paper says that glaciers in the Himalayas, over a period of the last 100 years, behave in contrasting ways. As an example, Sonapani glacier has retreated by about 500m during the last one hundred years. On the other hand, Kangriz glacier has practically not retreated even an inch in the same period. Siachen glacier is believed to have shown an advance of about 700m between 1862 and 1909, followed by an equally rapid retreat of around 400m between 1929 and 1958, and hardly any retreat during the last 50 years. Gangotri glacier, which had hitherto been showing a rather rapid retreat, along its glacier front, at an average of around 20m per year till up to 2000 AD, has since slowed down considerably, and between September 2007 and June 2009 is practically at a standstill5. The same is true of the Bhagirathkharak and Zemu glaciers.
The auhtors argue that it is premature to make a statement that glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of the global warming. A glacier is affected by a range of physical features and a complex interplay of climatic factors. It is therefore unlikely that the snout movement of any glacier can be claimed to be a result of periodic climate variation until many centuries of observations become available. While glacier movements are primarily due to climate and snowfall, snout movements appear to be peculiar to each particular glacier.
So what’s the big bet on Black Carbon given that it is indeed an immediate challenge for India. One of the points that probably get overlooked in the many informed discussions is that the impact of black carbon is in the proximity of emission and, therefore, of a localized nature. So, for India, it is not merely a question of how much it needs to be a per capita contributor to carbon footprints but, simply, what is it that is getting done in the eco sphere around the Himalayas that is impacting it?
Better stoves with lower emissions is clearly the way to go but the real benefit is from the other equally less visible, from a causative point of view is the health issue. As Penn Univ researcher Jeremy Carl had pointed out in his piece ‘Rising From the Ashes: India’s Black Carbon Opportunity’
“But India’s greatest black carbon reduction opportunity remains in cookstoves. Indeed it is the problem of indoor and local air pollution from cookstoves that has caused the Indian government and many private groups to initiate numerous campaigns over several decades to bring improved cookstoves to rural India. But generally speaking, these attempts have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons.
First, cookstoves may break and villagers may lack the money, spare parts, or expertise to repair them.
Second, traditional cookstoves give a particular flavor to foods and many Indian women are
reluctant to trade these in even for more theoretically efficient stoves.
Third, with the exception of the work done by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy, cookstove programs have almost always been done at a moderate scale. To achieve mass scale necessary for meaningful black carbon reduction (or large scale local health improvement), tens of millions of cookstoves will need to be put into the field and utilized. That takes scale, resources, and reach that can only be done with the active participation of the Indian state at the highest levels, ideally through a public-private partnership.
So says Jeremy Carl in a well articulated piece on how there is a big windfall for India in health of the Himalayas and women and children by managing its smoke in the kitchen better. Says Jeremy, a research fellow at Penn University, “black carbon stays in the atmosphere for weeks as opposed to decades like CO2, “controlling it could be the fastest way to slow down global warming in the near future.” The article also states that India has a great opportunity in this area. Along with China, India is the world’s largest emitter of black carbon and the greatest reduction solution for black carbon emissions remains in cooking stoves. This will also reap a domestic benefit as it will reduce the problem of indoor and local air pollution caused from traditional cooking stoves & fuels that contributes to premature deaths of hundreds and thousands of Indians each year.”
Black carbon is second only to Carbon Dioxide as a cause of climate change – accounting for one fifth of ‘observed global warming.’
Clearly, there is much India can do in Copenhagen beyond its well established position on climate change, one that will take care of both lives and the depressing sight of fast melting glaciers. As Jeremy notes, “There is no regime currently in place to deal with black carbon internationally, but by getting out in front of this issue, India can show the international climate change community that it is serious about contributing solutions rather than just rhetoric. “
However, what is probably a good to remember is that addressing the issue of smoke in the kitchen is an important end in itself and should not necessarily be subject to global trade-offs on climate change, as Jeremy makes a point of, given the large number of deaths we are talking about.
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