Overview
The Challenge
Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires—the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world—causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting wood. Women face severe personal security risks as they forage for fuel, especially from refugee camps and in conflict zones. Cookstoves also increase pressures on local environmental resources (e.g., forests, habitat) and contribute to climate change at the regional and global levels.
The Solution
The use of clean cookstoves and fuels can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and exposure to cookstove smoke. Development of a global clean cookstove industry that is constantly innovating to improve design and performance, while lowering the cost of stoves, can lead the way to widespread adoption of clean cooking solutions.
The Alliance
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a new public-private partnership to save lives, empower women, improve livelihoods, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s ‘100 by 20’ goal calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance will work with public, private, and non-profit partners to help overcome the market barriers that currently impede the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves in the developing world
The Time is Right
While hundreds of global and country-specific programs promote the deployment and use of cleaner and more efficient cookstoves, the field has yet to reach a truly global scale.
Yet, recent developments in the stove field are providing greater confidence that we can achieve large-scale success. Because of advances in design, testing, and monitoring; compelling new research on the health benefits of reduced exposure to cookstove smoke; new national cookstove programs in India, China, Mexico, and elsewhere; the mounting need for effective near- and long-term action to address climate change; growth of promising new business models; and the potential of carbon finance to fund stove projects, it may now be possible to reach hundreds of millions of the world’s poor with cleaner and more efficient stoves.
However, to achieve this ambitious goal, the global community must act now, focusing its efforts on the creation of a thriving and sustainable clean cookstove industry.
