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.”

Tackling one of the Big 'Three A's'

By Simon Bishop

One way of categorising the many challenges faced by people and organisations trying to sell improved cookstoves - ones that significantly reduce smoke and fuel use - at scale is the 'Three A's' - Awareness, Availability and Affordability:

Awareness - Often going to a village in India and saying "There is this thing called Indoor Air Pollution (IAP)" is like going there in 1984 and saying "there is this thing called AIDS". Almost no one understands the health risks or that improved cookstoves represent a solution.

Availability - This covers the entire supply-chain, from R&D, manufacturing, marketing, selling, delivering to after-sales service; all have their challenges.

Affordability - This relates to people's ability to be able to afford a stove and if they cannot, then perhaps to the provision of microfinance so that they can pay in installments over several months, thus making the purchase more viable.

This last challenge got a boost this week from a report published by Monitor Inclusive Markets, 'Stretching the Fabric of MFI Networks Report'. It outlines the challenges of trying to sell non-financial products - like solar lanterns, water purifiers and stoves - to members of microfinance institutions (MFIs).

The report makes it clear that such a route to market is no silver bullet to the 'Affordability' challenge. In fact, it says attempts to-date do it (the report contains four useful case studies) have had decidedly mixed results.

However, by describing pitfalls of past attempts and by offering five different conceptual models on how product manufacturer-MFI partnerships can work, the report is incredibly helpful. **

We at Shell Foundation are currently working with several MFIs and stove manufacturers to prove such partnerships are possible.

If we achieve this then it will be a significant step forward in cracking the 'Affordability' nut. This is part of our wider Breathing Space programme, which is also trying to crack the other two big 'A's'.

**Note: It is a follow on from Monitor's excellent 2009 report 'Emerging Markets, emerging models', which looks at more than 275 market-based solutions to poverty and environmental challenges in India.

Simon Bishop is Head of Policy and Communications Shell Foundation.

Nepal's high TB Incidence Linked to Indoor Air Pollution

Researchers from the school of public health at University of California at Berkeley in USA have recently conducted a study which shows a link between the high incidence of tuberculosis in Nepal and the large amount of fuel burnt in the country. More, importantly, the study has found something even more significant: kerosene, though not a biomass-based fuel, plays a bigger role in triggering the disease. More information can be accessed from Down to Earth (Issue dated Jan 15, 2o10), a science and environment online journal.

The researchers studied 125 women in the age group of 20-65 suffering from tuberculosis and getting treated in the Regional Tuberculosis Centre and Manipal Teaching Hospital, both located in the Pokhara municipality. Another 250 healthy women in the same age group were monitored as control. The women were questioned on history of use of cooking fuels and stoves, kitchen type and location, kitchen ventilation, burning of mosquito coils and incense. The researchers also visited a small number of households to verify the answers for the study that lasted from July 2005 to April 2007.

Burning wood, cow dung and other such biomass to keep the house warm harms the lungs more than when the same is used for cooking. This could be because cooking on stoves takes a long time. The woman goes into the kitchen once in a while to check if the food’s done, thus reducing her exposure to smoke. Using biomass for heating results in more exposure as there is a deliberate attempt to minimize ventilation as the family sits around the fire. This was not considered earlier as most of the studies on biomass and tuberculosis have been carried out in warmer countries but in Nepal night-time and winter temperatures are low.

Kerosene is more of a risk than biomass as burning of biomass produces dense smoke that make the eyes smart; so people stay away and avoid inhaling the fumes. But sitting right next to a kerosene lamp or lantern causes far less discomfort while exposing one to fine particulate matter and other lung-damaging chemicals.

“We plan to do a much larger and more detailed study to validate this finding as it would have major implications for policy if confirmed. Poorly burned kerosene is a risk, but to what extent must yet be determined with certainty,” said Kirk R Smith, who led the study.

“For the moment, I think the main policy implication is that along with kerosene fuel subsidies, there should be programmes to promote cleaner burning lamps and stoves,” added Smith. Identification of the risk factors that lead to tuberculosis is essential to reduce the disease burden in Nepal and other developing countries.

NOTES FROM NEPAL:
Efforts to combat IAP in Nepal have been going for a while. According to RIDS Nepal (http://www.rids-nepal.org/index.php/Smokeless_Metal_Stove_SMS.html), most Nepali households still use open fire places inside their homes for cooking, heating and light generation. Thus it does not come as a surprise that respiratory diseaases are wide spread, especially among women and children, as the pine wood used in the high altitude regions of Humla has a lot of resin and burns with lots of black smoke. Further, cooking on open fire places is a very inefficient use of this ever increasing precious biomass resource. An average household in Humla uses 20 - 40 kg firewood a day for cooking, heating and lighting. Cooking in particular uses large amounts of fire wood as the traditional meal, 'daal bhat' (rice, lentil and vegetables), has to be cooked one after the other.

The RIDS-Nepal developed smokeless metal stove protects people's health as not only is the combustion process much more efficient but it takes all the smoke out of the room through a chimney. Thus the indoor air is claen and the firewood consumption is reduced drastically by 40% to 50%. It allows people to cook 'daal bhat' all at once as it has three burners. Additionally a slit in the top heating plate enables the women to bake the traditional local flat-bread "roti" without opening the main fire door. Additionally, 9 liter stainelss steel water tank, attached to the side of the smokeless metal stove, provides clean, hot water for drinking and washing.

Photo Acknowledgement: RIDS-Nepal

NASA Study says Black Carbon Deposits on Himalayan Ice Threaten Earth’s "Third Pole"

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 Improved Cook Stoves Stories...

The New Yorker is the most recent to take a serious look at the Cookstoves challenge. (Burkhard Bilger, Annals of Invention, “Hearth Surgery,” The New Yorker, December 21, 2009, p. 84)

Later, writing for his blog (The Perfect Stove – New Yorker Blog Post), Bilger puts out a quick look at the annals of the new stove:

Industrial giants like Bosch-Siemens, British Petroleum, and Philips Electronics have all tried their hand at building more expensive and sophisticated devices—stoves that cost between twenty and a hundred dollars retail, and are clean enough to run indoors. The results have been mixed.
The Germans, at Bosch-Siemens, developed an elegant oil-burning unit called the Protos, but it never really took off. (It’s as noisy as a blast torch, I was told). The British, at BP, spent millions designing a stove that runs on pellets, then promptly abandoned the project and sold the design to an Indian company.

The Dutch, at Philips, have just finished field tests of a stainless -stell fan stove, a prototype of which I tried out this fall. The Philips stove has a rechargeable fan in its base that works as a kind of bellows: it helps the fire light quickly and keeps it burning hot and clean. The stove that I used boiled a pot of water faster than my GE gas range, produced almost no smoke, and left only a thin residue of ash behind.

Even more promising is a stove designed by an Italian-American engineer named Nathaniel Mulcahy. The LuciaStove, as he calls it, is a gasifier made of beautifully injection-molded aluminum. It’s modular in design, so its most intricate parts can be packed flat and shipped inexpensively, while the rest can be manufactured locally...

Finally, Dean Still and the engineers at Aprovecho have joined with a start-up firm called Biolite to create a new generation of low-emissions stoves. Their design incorporates a thermoelectric fan designed by Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond, co-founders of BioLite. The fan runs without batteries or external electricity. Instead, it uses the heat from the fire to generate its own power. Cedar and the Aprovecho staff built the prototype in October and presented it for the first time at an international stove meeting in Bangkok, in November. The new stove reduces emissions by more than ninety per cent, compared to an open fire, and should cost about twenty dollars a unit to build. Best of all, it’s user-friendly: unlike other fan stoves, it has a side-feeding combustion chamber that’s easy to refuel. Aprovecho and BioLite hope to make it commercially available by 2011.

(Photos: Top, the Philips Stove. Middle: Nat Mulcahy prepares to add fuel to his Lucia stove. The copper pot can be set on top of the stove to function as a space heater. Bottom: The Biolite Stove

Global Economies pitch in with $350 Million Climate REDI Initiative

At United Nations’ Summit on climate change at Copenhagen, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Secretary Steven Chu unveiled Climate REDI - the Climate Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative.

Climate REDI is a $350-million investment by major economies of the world towards increasing efficiencies in home appliances and developing renewable energy sources specifically wind and solar energy in developing world. The initiative will fund the deployment of “affordable home systems and LED lanterns to those without access to electricity,” according to a program fact sheet.

Reported Scientific American that Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment, India, welcomed the effort and called for his country to be one of the recipients. Such technology transfers with specific funding is what developing world is looking at as part of any Copenhagen agreement.

Writes Scientific American:

The 1970s, refrigerators in the U.S. have swelled from 18 cubic feet to 22 cubic feet. But, at the same time, the energy consumption of such gargantuan coolers has dropped by 75 percent, down to roughly 40 watts, saving countless tons of coal from being burned. And a five-year global program that reached all the refrigerators in the world with similar efficiency improvements might save 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over that span, a significant contribution to combating climate change.

And that's exactly what U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Secretary Steven Chu unveiled here Monday at the United Nations' summit on climate change: the Climate Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative (Climate REDI)—a $350-million investment by major economies, including $85 million from the U.S., to bring everything from efficient refrigerators to solar lanterns to the developing world.

"The energy savings from refrigerators is greater than all U.S. renewable energy generation—all the wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics —just the refrigerators," Chu said in a speech announcing the initiative, noting the refrigerators also cost less. "Energy efficiency is truly a case where you can have your cake and eat it too. [But] it was driven by standards; it didn't happen on its own."

In addition to coordinating global standards for efficient appliances, Climate REDI will also invest in further developing renewable energy sources—such as wind and solar power—in the developing world. The initiative will fund the deployment of "affordable home systems and LED lanterns to those without access to electricity," according to a program fact sheet.

"We want to help turn the lights on where people live but also in a way that helps solve climate change," Chu said, referring to the at least 1 billion people who lack access to electricity globally.

Jairam Ramesh, India's minister of the environment, welcomed the effort and called for his country to be one of the recipients. But he also noted that "Indian companies have been pioneers in low-cost pharmaceuticals now being widely used in Africa. I see no reason why Indian companies in the next five or six years with the help of American counterparts cannot emerge as world leaders in renewable energy technology.

Photo: U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Secretary Steven Chu.