Writing in BusinessGreen.com, she says "offsets enable this switch in technology that not only creates emission reductions, but has real and tangible benefits in terms of improving health and living conditions, allowing more money to be spent on other basic services and commodities like education and food."
In the article "Making the case for cooking stove offsets", Ashford says "I want to bang the drum about energy-efficient cooking stoves."
Drawing attention to the challenges of enabling transition to improved stoves in countries with high incidence of indoor air pollution, she points out that while most cookstove projects do start small, "they have the ability to scale up after the first couple of years. The proof of the concept is more convincing as an increasing number of households start to use them. This dissemination is also largely bolstered by budding entrepreneurial networks that manufacture the new stoves and those which distribute and sell them."
According to Ashford, "Exchanges in skills have taken place between Asia and Africa in terms of the lessons taken on board and I am hopeful that carbon finance can continue to facilitate the expansion of this new technology into other geographies and markets. There are a number of cookstove projects in the development cycle from a carbon perspective, but the projects are complex and it is not a quick process to get them up and running either, both in terms of carbon (ie registering the projects) or of their on-the-ground-operation."
Read here the article "Making the case for cooking stove offsets"
