AnIHT Special Report says that the push for clean cookstoves to reduce indoor air pollution was elevated from a public health backwater to a high place on the global agenda with the kick off of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in New York, at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.
Detailing the journey of Envirofit in its quest to provide improved cookstoves that reduce harmful emissions by 80 per cent, the report notes that Envirofit has sold more than 150,000 portable cookstoves in India, priced at $12 to $25.
Envirofit makes 90 percent of its sales in India. But it started in business in Africa this year, in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia and other countries. Plans are in the works to expand in Latin America.
In spite of the support from Mrs. Clinton, “plenty of work remains in raising awareness about indoor air pollution and making clean cookstoves more efficient and affordable,” said Simon Bishop, head of policy and communications at the Shell Foundation. Global standards must be implemented and governments need to promote testing and certification of clean stoves. “This is an infant industry. We are going to need a lot of Envirofits,” Mr. Bishop said. “The world needs more energy but less carbon dioxide.”
The Launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has resulted in the issue -- and the solutions -- getting reported and discussed widely.
The New York Times in its Editorial "Cleaner, Healthier Cookstoves" makes that point that "Researchers have long known of the risks of primitive indoor stoves — including pneumonia in children, lung cancer, pulmonary and cardiovascular disease. They have also known that these stoves contribute to global warming by producing large quantities of fine-particle soot normally associated with diesel engines and burning down forests.
The replacement stoves are relatively small, simple cylindrical devices costing less than $100 and capable of capturing between half and 95 percent of the harmful emissions. The program will sensibly not use the money to buy and ship stoves but, rather, to create small manufacturing companies close to the target populations — creating new jobs in the process. This is an ingenious and overdue response to a global problem."
Says The Economist in its write up, "The best reason for hope may lie in the new-found awareness of market forces among governments and the UN crowd. Pressed on this point, Mrs Clinton says emphatically that the new stoves “must not be given away”. As with anti malarial bed nets, she argues, charging a little makes people value and use them properly.
That will come as good news to the small army of entrepreneurs in the developing world now coming up with novel business models to sell and service the cooking stoves. One such innovator is Suraj Wahab of Toyola, a start-up selling some 60,000 stoves a year in Ghana by offering micro-credit. His advice to the new UN coalition is “please don’t offer handouts and don’t give away stoves.”
The Guardian blog reports Simon Bishop of Shell Foundation saying "Having a sitting US secretary of state say that the world needs to focus on harmful cookstove smoke - which kills 1.9 million people a year globally - is a huge, massive boost to an issue that has for too long been seen as a low priority by the global community."
The remarks by Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on the launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves was echoed in the African press, "There have been cook stove initiatives before—some have worked and some have not. The expertise in this room knows why—and it is this experience and these skills that will make this alliance a success. Indeed, when I look at the faces out there and the organizations you represent, I seesuccess stories everywhere. US EPA is partner along with the government of the Netherlands and UNIDO and UNEP among others in the Partnership for Cleaner Fuels and Vehicles—phased lead out of petrol in Africa, and almost everywhere else in around three year. The UN Foundation and Shell Foundation, partners in for example the Indian Solar Loan project that through working with banks assisted 100,000 people in rural India to access solar power."
The Huffington Post writes "This extraordinary coalition has come together around one core belief: The time is right for the world to focus on this issue. The Alliance needs others to step up. The global community needs to make cookstoves a priority. If it does, progress will be made toward the MDGs, millions of lives will be saved, and the global environment protected. Cooking shouldn't kill. It shouldn't kill women and children. It shouldn't kill the environment."
Morgan Stanley in a press release announced that it is a Founding Partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. "Given our long track record of supporting pediatric health initiatives and our commitment to protecting the environment, we are very proud to be a Founding Partner of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves," says Tom Nides, Chief Operating Officer of Morgan Stanley. "We look forward to committing our intellectual capital to this effort and working with our Alliance partners to address this pressing issue in the months and years ahead."
A number of developments indicate that there is increasing momentum for the dangers of traditional cookstoves to be successfully addressed. These include advances in stove design, testing and monitoring; the potential of carbon financing to reduce stove costs; and commercial entrants with significant production capacity.
"While the harmful and tragic effects of traditional cookstoves have long been known, we believe the right conditions are in place to address this problem more effectively than ever before," said Audrey Choi, Head of Global Sustainable Finance at Morgan Stanley. "We look forward to contributing Morgan Stanley's intellectual capital to solving environmental and health problems that require market-based solutions and economic insight."
Noted theBBC commenting on the launch of the Alliance "It is believed to be the first major attempt to tackle the issue worldwide. The project will attempt to build on national programmes already underway in India, Mexico and Peru. It aims to introduce modern low-pollution stoves to the homes of 100 million poor people by 2020. Clean stoves run on biomass (with chimneys and clean-burn mechanisms), or gas, or on solar power. The stoves programme would help to protect poor people from eye disease, lung disease and cancer; save forests from being ravaged for fuel; reduce CO2 emissions and reduce emissions of black smoke, which also contributes to global warming. But it is a huge challenge for a global partnership to deal with the scattered homes of the estimated 3 billion poor people who cook on stoves or open fires."
SNVa Founding Partner of the Alliance in a press release quoted Dirk Elsen, SNV Chief Executive, stating, "The environment, renewable energy, and improved welfare of women and children are clearly defined SNV strategic concerns and each of our projects around the world is undertaken with them in consideration. Therefore, we are very excited about joining the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves whose mission and goals fit in perfectly with these SNV strategic priorities. As a Founding Partner in the Alliance, we intend to take an active role in helping define standards, encourage research, and set the vision for the global deployment of improved cookstoves."
SNV has successfully promoted the implementation of biogas, biofuels and clean cookstove programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is committed to using its expertise in developing market-based solutions and working with the private, public and non-profit sectors to ensure the worldwide dissemination of bio-energy technologies, thereby improving the health of women and children as well as mitigating the impact of climate change. As a part of the Alliance, SNV can leverage this experience to scale up efforts in the clean cookstove sector, which is reaching a "tipping point" thanks to advances in cookstove design and testing, new research on harmful effects of inefficient cookstoves, an increased awareness of the need to address climate change challenges and ability to reach scale via carbon finance.
The Christian Science Monitornoted that "the idea is not simply to flood poor countries with a one-size-fits-all cooking alternative – an approach that hasn’t gotten very far in the past – but rather to consult finicky local tastes and use local markets to develop and distribute different cookstoves for different regions and cultures. The objective: create cleaner, healthier, environmentally sound and locally adapted stoves that women will want."
Environment News Service quotes UN Foundation President Timonthy Wirth saying "Energy is the essential enabler of the Millennium Development Goals," said United Nations Foundation President Timothy Wirth. "Broader access to electricity and modern fuels doesn't just provide light or move machinery. It powers education, health care, and prosperity, and through sustainable technologies, such as solar panels and clean and efficient cookstoves, lives are saved and our environment protected."
"Cooking a meal shouldn't be hazardous to your health," Wirth said. "Cookstoves that reduce fuel consumption and operate cleanly will save lives, prevent disease, provide more time for women and girls to devote to schooling and earn money and reduce environmental degradation. That addresses almost all of the MDGs."
"For 10 years we have been helping to deliver market-based solutions to selling clean cookstoves in India, China, Central America and Africa. The sector has made great progress," said Shell Foundation Director Chris West. Still, he said, "Stove manufacturers face numerous barriers to successfully selling clean cookstoves at scale, and just like any infant industry they need support to address those barriers."
Royal Dutch Shell plc. (Shell) has announced a donation of $6 million to support a global initiative to prevent deaths and cut greenhouse gas emissions caused by the smoke from traditional cooking stoves.
“Indoor air pollution is one of the most significant energy poverty issues facing the developing world,” said Peter Voser, Chief Executive Officer of Royal Dutch Shell plc. “With three billion people worldwide using open fires or traditional stoves in their homes, this initiative is a step forward in making a huge and tangible difference to their health and environment. So I would urge others to support this initiative – a clean burning cooking stove for each home isn’t that much to ask.”
Shell’s donation, staged over three years, will be the largest private contribution backing the work of the newly launched Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), a public-private initiative to support the large-scale use of clean burning domestic stoves in developing countries. Launched by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, GACC aims for an additional 100 million homes, roughly 20% of the affected population, to have an efficient cooking stove by 2020. The annual CO2 reduction for each energy-efficient stove is approximately 1.5 tonnes, so the cumulative effect of 100 million new stoves would be approximately 150 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
Manufacturers of clean stoves currently face difficulties getting their products to the people who need them, and with no internationally recognised global standards, more needs to be done to let people and communities know about the dangers they are facing.
Shell’s commitment will be tackling these problems, specifically by:
Helping to develop global standards and stove testing protocols, to ensure customers get a quality product that has been approved and tested on the ground in each local market;
Enhancing routes to market, tackling the issues of affordability and accessibility;
Assisting with development of innovative financing mechanisms that would enable manufacturers to potentially benefit from carbon-credits, and;
Raising awareness of the health and environmental risks caused by the smoke from inefficient cooking stoves.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves led by the United Nations Foundation, will bring together leading foundations, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, corporate leaders, governments and UN agencies to help overcome current barriers and stimulate a thriving global market for clean cookstoves, says a Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves Press Release.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a $60 million dollar public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. Exposure to smoke from traditional stoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for 3 billion people in developing countries – causes almost 2 million deaths annually, with women and young children affected most. That is a life lost every 16 seconds.
The Alliance’s goal is for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.
This was announced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today during the Secretary’s remarks at the Clinton Global Initiative forum.
"Today we can finally envision a future in which open fires and dirty stoves are replaced by clean, efficient and
affordable stoves and fuels all over the world -- stoves that still cost as little as $25,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “By upgrading these dirty stoves, millions of lives could be saved and improved. Clean stoves could be as transformative as bed nets or vaccines."
Cookstove smoke contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood
pneumonia, emphysema, lung cancer, bronchitis, cardiovascular disease and low birth weight. The smoke from inefficient stoves continues to contribute to global climate change by producing harmful greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane, and aerosols such as black carbon. Reliance on biomass for
cooking and heating also increases pressure on local natural resources and forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting firewood – an especially dangerous task for women and girls in refugee camps and conflict zones.
The use of efficient cookstoves can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and exposure to harmful smoke. Recent scientific evidence confirms that the greater the emissions reductions, the greater the health benefits. More efficient stoves also reduce the time people (usually women and girls) have to spend collecting fuel, and since stoves last for several years, the accumulated savings in time and cost can be invested back into families, communities and economies.
The reductions in emissions achieved by clean cookstoves have the potential to create revenues from carbon credits. Stove companies can use this revenue to reduce stove prices or expand into new markets. More broadly, the entire clean cookstove supply-chain should be a source of economic opportunity and job creation at the local level.
To achieve its ‘100 by 20’ goal, the Alliance will establish industry standards; spur innovative financing mechanisms; champion the cause across the donor and development communities; develop indoor air quality guidelines; address global tax and tariff barriers; field test clean stoves and fuels; and develop research roadmaps across key sectors such as health, climate, technology and fuels.
A thriving global industry for clean cooking solutions will provide a range of long-term benefits for the entire world –from improving global health to combating climate change.
Alliance Founding Partners
United Nations Foundation, Shell Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of State, World Health Organization (WHO), German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH, Morgan Stanley, UN-
Energy, World Food Programme, UN Environment Programme (UNEP), UN Industrial Development Organization, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention), UN High Commissioner for Refugees, SNV: Netherlands Development Organisation, Shell, Government of Peru, Government of Norway.
Excerpts from the speech by Hillary Clinton announcing the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves:
Today, I am very excited to tell you about a new initiative that will advance these and other efforts, and help put vital new tools in the hands of millions of people.
As we meet here in New York, women are cooking dinner for their families in homes and villages around the world. As many as 3 billion people are gathering around open fires or old and inefficient stoves in small kitchens and poorly ventilated houses. Many of the women have labored over these hearths for hours, often with their infant babies strapped to their backs, and they have spent many more hours gathering the fuel. The food they prepare is different on every continent, but the air they breathe is shockingly similar: a toxic mix of chemicals released by burning wood or other solid fuel that can reach 200 times the amount that our EPA considers safe for breathing.
As the women cook, smoke fills their lungs and the toxins begin poisoning them and their children. The results of daily exposure can be devastating: Pneumonia, the number one killer of children worldwide, chronic respiratory diseases, lung cancer, and a range of other health problems are the consequence.The World Health Organization considers smoke from dirty stoves to be one of the five most serious health risks that face people in poor, developing countries.
Nearly 2 million people die from its effects each year, more than twice the number from malaria. And because the smoke contains greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane, as well as black carbon, it contributes to climate change.There are other consequences as well. In conflict zones like the Congo, the journeys that women must take to find scarce fuel put them at increased risk of violent and sexual assault. Even in safer areas, every hour spent collecting fuel is an hour not spent in school or tending crops or running a business.
People have cooked over open fires and dirty stoves for all of human history, but the simple fact is they are slowly killing millions of people and polluting the environment. Engineers and development professionals have worked on this problem for decades. My own involvement stretches back many years, and I’m well aware that well-meaning efforts have been launched, but none have managed to match the scope of the challenge.
But today, because of technological breakthroughs, new carbon financing tools, and growing private sector engagement, we can finally envision a future in which open fires and dirty stoves are replaced by clean, efficient, and affordable stoves and fuels all over the world – stoves that still cost as little as $25.I know that maybe this sounds hard to believe, but by upgrading these stoves, millions of lives could be saved and improved.
This could be as transformative as bed nets or even vaccines. So today, I am very pleased to announce the creation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
This is a public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation that will work toward the goal of 100 million homes adopting new clean stoves and fuels by 2020. Our long-term goal is universal adoption all over the world, and the alliance is a perfect CGI model of a public-private partnership that already includes governments such as the United States, Germany, Norway, and Peru, international development organizations and local NGOs, as well as foundations and private companies such as Morgan Stanley and Shell.
And we do expect to grow quickly with your help, and this effort will proceed on a number of parallel tracks. First, a major applied research and development effort to improve design, lower costs, and develop global industry standards for cookstoves. There are already some good stoves out there, but we can make them much more durable, efficient, and affordable, and scale up production to reach a mass market. With the right advances, new stoves could even use their own wasted heat to produce electricity that powers smoke-clearing fans, mobile phones, and even household lights.Second, a broad-based campaign to create a commercial market for clean stoves, includingreducing trade barriers, promoting consumer awareness, and boosting access to large-scale carbon financing. Now, no single stove will meet the needs of every community across the world.
In fact, previous efforts have taught us that if local tastes and preferences are not considered, people will simply not use the stoves, and we’ll find them stacked in piles of refuse. That’s why a market-based approach that relies on testing, monitoring, and research is so important, because if we do this right, these new stoves will fit seamlessly into family cooking traditions while also offering a step up toward a better life.Third, we will integrate clean stoves into our international development projects so that refugee camps, disaster relief efforts, and long-term aid programs all will act as distribution networks.
Women and girls who are obviously the vast majority of stove users will be our focus throughout.
The United States is committing more than $50 million over the next five years to this initiative, and we urge other countries to join us. Our partners have already contributed an additional $10 million, and we’re working to raise more every day with the goal of reaching at least $250 million over 10 years.
This is a project that brings, across our government, the experts together, and many of them have long experience in working on clean stoves, but never before have we pulled our resources and our expertise behind a single global campaign, as we are doing today. And never before have we had the range of global partners and coordination that the Alliance for Clean Cookstoves brings with it.
So we need your help as well. You’re here because you are already committed to identifying and investing in innovative solutions to persistent global problems. So today, I ask you to join us, to be a part of this solution, an issue that brings together so many of our concerns. Whether you’re passionate about health or the environment or sustainable development or women’s empowerment, this is a project for you, and we need you.
The next time you sit down with your own family to eat, please take a moment to imagine the smell of smoke, feel it in your lungs, see the soot building up on the walls, and then come find us at the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Hearths, whatever they look like, and wherever we gather around them, where we tell our stories and pass down our values, bind families together. And the benefits from this initiative will be cleaner and safer homes, and that will, in turn, ripple out for healthier families, stronger communities, and more stable societies. So we are excited because we think this is actually a problem we can solve.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will formally announce on September 21 the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a new public-private initiative to create a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions that will save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change, says a US Department of State Press Release.
Along with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and other Founding Partners, Secretary Clinton will outline partnership and financial commitments of the Alliance. Led by the United Nations Foundation, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves will address one of the greatest threats facing developing countries and their populations— the extraordinarily high exposures to toxic smoke from indoor fires and inefficient cookstoves which lead to nearly 2 million deaths each year, with young children and adult women suffering the vast majority of this disease burden.
The announcement will occur at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting on September 21 at approximately 1:00 p.m.
Secretary Clinton's speech will be streamed live on www.state.gov and http://live.clintonglobalinitiative.org.
Research projects of the Cornell University for making richer Biochar through a combination of development of micro-organisms and development of cookstoves that would produce biochar while eliminating indoor emissions has received funding from the Basic Research to Enable Agricultural Development (BREAD), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to Cornell University's Chronicle Online, two Cornell-based research projects -- one that boosts the soil-building effects of biochar for plants and another that harnesses genomics technology to accelerate maize and sorghum breeding in Africa by three-to-four times -- have each been given more than $1.6 million in grants.
The first project aims to develop microorganisms (inoculants) to add to biochars, produced when organic waste is burned at low temperatures without oxygen, to improve soil health in small farms in Kenya, where soil degradation is directly linked to food insecurity, hunger and poverty.
"Biochars act like a sponge or microbial reef where microorganisms like to live, proliferate and hide from predators," said Johannes Lehmann, associate professor of soil biogeochemistry, who leads the project. The inoculants would infect plant roots and support mycorrhizae fungi and other bacteria to provide plants with such essential nutrients as nitrogen and promote growth.
Lehmann's group also seeks to develop stoves that would be made locally in Africa. The stoves would produce biochar while they were used for cooking and would eliminate indoor smoke, a serious health consequence of wood stoves in Africa. Also, farmers would be able to use such on-farm waste as shrubs, grasses and crop residues -- rather than harder-to-find wood -- to fire up the stoves.
The $1.6 million project also includes outreach to spread information and protocols about biochar, inoculants and cook stoves through workshops, presentations, CDs and publications.
The group includes researchers from Cornell's Departments of Crop and Soil Sciences, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Applied Economics and Management; the University of California--Irvine; World Agroforestry Center of Kenya; and the University of New South Wales, Australia.
To more than triple breeding cycle rates to develop new maize and sorghum varieties in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers received $1.7 million to apply new molecular breeding technology to sequence trillions of base pairs from 12,000 breeding lines of maize and then sorghum. They hope to winnow the lines down by 90 percent, retaining only those that hold the most promise for drought tolerance and nitrogen efficiency.
Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group, known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), file dispatches from the field during their trip.
In their their sixth blog post for Scientific American, they speak evocatively of their efforts in collecting emission date from three-stone stoves among the villagers of Kalinzi, thus:
"Our first order of business involved collecting quantifiable emissions data from charcoal and three-stone stoves—the current standards among most Kalinzi villagers. The two main problematic components from stove emissions are carbon monoxide, which has been linked to maternity problems, and fine particulates, which contribute to Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI). We decided that our own kitchen was a good place to start and proceeded to take data as our cook, Tuma, prepared lunch and dinner. After a full day of monitoring the efficiency and particulate emissions generated from our stove, we went to the local cinema to watch a soccer match. The tiny building was set up like a church with a center aisle and about 15 rows of simple wooden benches containing 100 or so Tanzanians, with soccer as the object of worship.
The next morning, we woke up before sunrise to the crowing of roosters and began our first full day in the village. Our objective was to finish designing a top lit updraft (TLUD) gasification stove that could burn coffee husks. The TLUD concept was pioneered by Paul Anderson, an expert on Improved Cook Stoves (ICS) for developing societies, whom some previous HELP students were lucky to meet in the spring during an assessment trip..."
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 X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit that designs and administers competitions with prizes of up to $30 million, the Government of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi have formed a partnership to create a global competition to develop and deploy clean and efficient cookstoves, says a Press Release of the Foundation.
The competition will focus on the development of affordable and clean-burning cookstove technologies (and possibly delivery models) and is a part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009. Details of the competition, including the announcement of the launch date, prize purse and competition guidelines are forthcoming.
A study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that indoor air pollution was responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths worldwide in the year 2000, making it the second largest environmental contributor to ill health, behind unsafe water and sanitation. Additionally, the study found that when households are filled with smoke from inefficient stoves, exposure to these emissions increase the risks of developing pneumonia, cataracts, and tuberculosis. Furthermore, cookstoves generate products of incomplete combustion that are contributors to climate change.
Approximately 70% of Indian households -- more than 160 million households, comprising about 770 million people – are estimated to depend on simple but polluting cookstoves that burn solid fuel, mainly wood or coal. It also is estimated that approximately 400,000 to 550,000 people – primarily women and children – die of the resulting indoor air pollution each year in the country. This makes the cookstoves problem in India and the potential market for cleaner cookstoves amongst the largest in the world.
The cookstoves competition falls under the X PRIZE Foundation’s Education & Global Development prize group, which tackles major challenges in areas such as learning, hunger, health and water. Addressing the grand challenges of our time, the X PRIZE Foundation generates innovation through incentivized competition. Through the strategic design of ground-breaking competitions with significant, multi-million dollar prize purses, X PRIZE spurs collaboration among the world’s most brilliant minds to tackle the most pressing issues and create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.
The competition is also an integral part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009 after extensive deliberations and input from a range of domestic and international experts. The Initiative builds upon an earlier program that disseminated 35 million cookstoves. The National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative aims to develop next-generation cookstoves; establish state-of-the-art testing, certification and monitoring facilities; strengthen research and development programs in key technical institutions; and create and implement innovative large-scale delivery models. All of these activities are to be assessed by an independent monitoring unit, and implemented through public-private partnerships.
MNRE believes that the technologies and delivery models that will be developed through this Initiative will be useful in India as well as in 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. The cleaner combustion in the contemplated devices will also greatly reduce the products of incomplete combustion, which are greenhouse pollutants, thus helping combat climate change. Therefore, the success of the Initiative and the prize competition could well have a transformative impact for the energy poor in developing countries around the world while also helping tackle the important problem of climate change.
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