Black Carbon Should Be A Prime Policy Target

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.”

The Challenge of an Energy Policy Framework

As part of an effort to make available clean improved cookstoves to people who rely on traditional cookstoves and fuels which lead to Indoor Air Pollution, First Energy has been focused on delivering Oorja cookstoves to rural & tribal India. First Energy is an alternative energy startup that spun out of BP. In an interview with Think Change India, Mahesh Yagnaraman, founder of First Energy speaks more about their operations. Here are the excerpts.

What do you think is lacking in the sector of your organization’s interest in spite of your intervention? The policy framework for energy is very lop sided. Subsidies are making fuel unaffordable for the Government and the country. At the same time, the alternative energy subsidies have not led to any adoption of scalable, sustainable alternative energy development. In the case of the specific business of FE, the company faces twin challenges – cooking gas, LPG, is subsidised to the extent of Rs 290 per bottle and the wrong incentives for biomass power generation has driven up the prices of agri-waste artificially.

Who are the founders and management? What do they do? The founders are myself, Mukund Deogaonkar, Sreeram Thiagrajan and Raymond Moses. I have been the Managing Director of FE since 2006, Mukund is the Operations Director. Sreeram & Raymond are executive directors on the board and actively support the team through their guidance and coaching.

At the Alchemists Ark, Sreeram and Raymond consult for and add value in sales, marketing, supply chain to several MNCs and large corporates in India and abroad. Raymond is alumnus of IIT Kanpur while Sreeram is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad.

I have been at the helm of the business in India since its start in Feb 2006 bringing together an initial team of talented people, and setting up the company. I did my MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and have a career spanning 19 years in different countries/continents and across strategy, sales, marketing, supply chain and IT implementation at Unilever, Castrol and BP.

Mukund Deogaonkar has been associated with the business from the start and has been the part of the team that was responsible for creating business concept and heads the operations. He has sales and marketing experience for over 17 years in fuels and lubricant industries and has strong proven ability to forge partnerships and relationships across the value chain.

How is it funded? The venture is self-funded at this point by the founders.

How do you measure your effectiveness? We use the two straightforward metrics of profitably and stoves sold.

Assuming this problem exists in similar forms throughout the world, what unique challenges do you face in fighting it here in India?
India’s energy framework is still very closed and not liberalised. The heavy subsidies make the entire thing very inefficient.

How do you intend to scale this model going forward? What are the future goals/plans for the venture? We aim to be profitable this year, at least at the per unit level. In the next 3 – 5 years we want to reach 1 million households. Beyond that, however, like 10 years out we have not thought that far.

What criteria do you use to identify partners/beneficiaries? We look at their ability to provide channel or route to market, share the same values and commitment in serving underserved markets, willingness to exercise patient capital, and have the ability to influence or shape policy.

Creating An Aspiration for Stoves

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.

This echoes the Three As that Shell Foundation is seeking to address through its Room to Breath Campaign, namely Awareness, Availability and Affordability .

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 full feature, Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves

Joint initiative Brings Much Needed Environmental Health Training to India

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.

2010 UNEP Sasakawa Award for TWP Cook Stove Program

Trees, Water & People has been named co-laureate for the 2009-10 UN Environment Program (UNEP) Sasakawa Prize.

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.

US Ambassador Roemer calls for Clean Cookstove Standards

US Ambassador to India Timothy J Roemer on a two-day visit to Bangalore sat with women and savoured the aroma of vermicelli kheer freshly made on an improved cooking stove. He called for initiating clean cook stove standards to combat deaths through Indoor Air Pollution

Roemer on Thursday checked out a new range of stoves, that emit less smoke than traditional chulhas.

Interacting with a group of women, Roemer saw the ingredients that went into preparation of an Indian curry while enquiring about their experiences with stove, developed by Envirofit, which launched a range of clean burning biomass cook stoves across India in 2008.

Lauding the energy efficient technology used in the stove, he said such technology was good for business and health. India could provide leadership in such emerging technology as it did in IT technology field. "The new technology is safe for children, women and affordable," he said.

Designed by an international team of globally recognised scientists and engineers, the stoves reduces toxic emissions by nearly 80 per cent while using 50 per cent less fuel and reducing cooking cycle time by 40 per cent when compared to traditional chulhas.

Shell Foundation, Envirofit and the Stove That Won't Kill the World's Poor

The Sunday Times, London, writes about The Stove That Won't Kill The World's Poor:

NEARLY half the world’s population relies on crude open-fire stoves. They produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-damaging carbon dioxide and are often lethal to their users. According to the World Health Organisation, a person dies every 20 seconds from illnesses brought on by inhaling the toxins in the soot from wood, animal dung or other detritus that serves as fuel.

A company funded by the charitable arm of Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant, has developed a cheap and efficient stove that it says could save carbon and lives. Envirofit, a spinout from the University of Colorado, claims that its $20 (£13) stoves cut smoke and toxic emissions by 80%, and halve the amount of fuel that is needed. It aims to sell 10m in the developing world over the next five years.

This has been tried before. In India, where 400,000 people die every year from indoor air pollution, the government gave away 20m new stoves in the late 1990s. The initiative failed because the new kit was of poor quality and there was a lack of aftercare. Most people went back to cooking with their old stoves.

What is different this time, said Simon Bishop, head of policy at the Shell Foundation, is that Envirofit is approaching it as a money-making venture. “Everything we do is about applying business thinking to poverty and environmental issues. There is never going to be enough aid to go around so what you need to do is to focus our limited resources on self-financing mechanisms that can make a big impact.”

The Shell Foundation put up $10m of the $25m raised to roll out Envirofit’s stoves across India and is leading an awareness-raising campaign called Breathing Space.

Envirofit is keen to avoid the mistakes of India’s first attempt at tackling the problem. Tying stove sales into micro-finance initiatives, which give credit to low income clients, is critical. The Shell Foundation’s work includes using vans that spread the word by travelling round villages in India putting on street theatre or employing someone to go door-to-door promoting the stoves.

Study underway on COPD in rural non-smokers

The Chest Research Foundation (CRF) of India, a respiratory health research and education body set up in 2002, has initiated what it says is the world's first study to locate the cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in non-smokers. The Government of India Ministry of Health and Welfare says India has 17 million living with COPD, a number that is estimated to go up to 22 million by 2016, according to a story in the Mint.

The study is being conducted in collaboration with the Imperial College of London.

While obstructive airways diseases are typically considered an after-effect of rapid urbanization, the pressures of modern living and ignorance, new studies have established that a substantial number of COPD patients were exposed to indoor air pollution due to smoke from biomass fuel such as firewood, CRF director Sundeep Salvi said.

Around 70% of households in India, especially in rural regions, use biomass fuel for cooking. “This has actually led our research to focus on the rural population and the spread of the disease among non-smokers,” said Salvi.

Of the patients with COPD, around 40% are non-smokers, but Salvi said this number could increase as nearly half the world’s population is exposed to biomass fuel.

Black Carbon emissions from India up 51%

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.

Market Solutions to Combat Indoor Air Pollution

A recent GVEP International report titled Cookstoves and Markets: Experiences, Successes and Opportunities of December 2009 takes a look at the full horizon of cookstoves, ranging from development, marketing and commercializing of efficient cookstoves to reducing Indoor Air Pollution that leads to one death every 20 seconds.
In a comprehensive overview of Shell Foundation’s efforts to develop enterprise based solutions to the challenge of Indoor Air Pollution, Richard Gomes from Shell Foundation says that 80,000 cookstoves sold by program partner Envirofit would improve the livelihood, health, social and economic status of over 300,000 people in Southern Indian states. In addition, these stoves would, over their 5-year lifetime, add up to over Rs 500 million of savings for India’s lowest-income consumers and save over 10 million hours not spent gathering fuel. This, says Gomes, is money kept in the hands of the poor and hours saved that can be better spent on education, family time or personal enterprise efforts.
The 80,000 cookstoves alone could keep over 580,000 tons of CO2 and over 114,000 kg of black carbon from entering the atmosphere. Envirofit cookstoves’ combustion technology reduces 1 ton of greenhouse gasses per stove annually and requires 50% less biomass fuel. According to Gomes, one of the challenges is to make the stoves affordable to users at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid with incomes as low as US $2 a day. The key to overcoming this problem is in the stoves design. The latest range of Envirofit cookstoves reduce smoke and toxic emissions by up to 80%, but importantly the improved stoves also use up to 60% less fuel compared with traditional stoves. With each base unit costing ~1399 Indian Rupees (US$28), users are able to pay for the stove within six to eight months through fuel savings alone. This self-financing loop makes it possible to scale-up the initiative over time impacting millions across the globe.
According to Richard Gomes, the most effective, internationally-recognised way to tackle IAP and reduce carbon output is through affordable ‘clean cookstoves’ that reduce emissions and fuel use. Shell Foundation realises that in order to tackle this wide spread, a market-oriented approach is required, one which works along the entire improved stove supply-chain – from research & development through to the end-user, creating a viable large scale stove industry.
Gomes writes: “From 2002 to 2007, the Foundation committed more than US$10million to nine pilot schemes to test sustainable, commercially focused cookstoves. The pilots operated across seven countries (in South East Asia, Latin America and East Africa) and involved partners with significant experience in the field, aimed to learn what worked, what didn’t and then expand the best approach. This resulted in the sale of more than a quarter of a million stoves.
Envirofit launched their cookstoves business in India in May 2008. Since then the Foundation has helped them to develop market strategies which focus on rural villages across South West India and to ensure the sustainability of their supply chain.
Envirofit now plans to leverage Shell Foundation’s investment to secure $25 million in funding which will enable them to expand their operations. The current aim is to sell at least 10 million stoves into emerging markets over the next five years. This achievement is the result of a long journey which began in the research laboratories of Colorado State University.
Shell Foundation provided continuous business development support to help get the business off the ground and to find the right strategic model to reach poor communities at greatest risk from IAP. The Foundation also used its links with Shell Group offices in India to build in-house expertise within the new venture by advising on recruitment, stakeholder engagement, safety guidelines, local business practices and the manufacturing and distribution landscape.
The Foundation recently began a social-marketing awareness campaign in the rural villages of southwest India, explaining the dangers of IAP and promoting the clean cookstoves solution. The campaign is set to go nationwide in 2010. To reach consumers in lower income brackets, the partners are working with several microfinance groups to extend credit to consumers that don’t have access to formal financial services.
This issue of Indoor Air Pollution has moved to the forefront of the news agenda in the past few months, particularly in the United States of America. Envirofit and Shell Foundation are achieving radical reductions in emissions and energy consumption through their new stoves. By establishing a financially viable solution that can be replicated in new markets, there is a good chance that this positive impact will be extended to a high percentage of the poor communities that are most at risk from the damaging effects of IAP, and become a major contributor to halting the march of global warming over coming years.”