Solution
How do clean cookstoves and other clean cooking solutions save lives, empower women, improve livelihoods, and combat climate change?
Save Lives
The use of efficient cookstoves can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and exposure to harmful cookstove smoke. Other steps—installing a chimney, opening windows, keeping children away from cooking fires, and drying wood before using it—can also help reduce direct exposure to smoke, but they do little to mitigate the other air quality, forestry, livelihood, or climate impacts of traditional cookstoves. The development of a thriving global clean cookstove industry that is constantly innovating to improve design and performance, while lowering the cost of stoves, is therefore seen as the most sustainable way to tackle this issue.
Improve Livelihoods
More efficient stoves also reduce the time people (usually women and girls) have to spend collecting fuel. In cases where fuel is purchased, the cost of an efficient cookstove can be covered by the savings in fuel within a few months. Cleaner stoves may last for several years, allowing the accumulated fuel savings to be spent on a range of livelihood-enhancing activities (e.g., income-producing enterprises for women, medicine, and school attendance for children).
The reductions in emissions achieved by clean cookstoves can also create revenues from carbon credits. Stove companies can use this revenue in many ways, for example to reduce the stove price (thus making these products more affordable to poorer consumers), or to 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. In all cases—central mass-production or local production—local business partners will be needed for distribution, sales, and service of stoves, as well as supply of processed fuels, where appropriate. A thriving global industry for clean cooking solutions will provide these benefits on a sustainable basis, providing jobs to many thousands of individuals. The Alliance is particularly interested in creating such local economic opportunities for women.
Combat Climate Change
Typically, cookstoves in developing country markets cost from a few dollars to $100, with the higher-performing stoves (95% reduction in emissions) generally costing more than those that provide important, but lower benefits (40-50% reduction in emissions). Recent scientific evidence confirms that the greater the emissions reductions, the greater the health benefits.
