Cookstoves
Inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves and fuels create indoor air pollution.
Around 2,600 million people cook using open fires or simple traditional stoves.
The most basic set-up consists of 3 stones with a fire in-between and the cooking pot balanced on top.
Firewood, charcoal, animal dung, crop wastes, kerosene and coal are typical fuels.
Fuelwood or charcoal, extracted from the surrounding forest and inefficiently burnt indoors, creates smoke and uses a lot of fuel.
Carbon finance provides revenue to subsidise cookstove distribution
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2020) – “Energy”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/energy’ [Online Resource]
Why Cookstoves as a Carbon Offset?
Charcoal and Fuelwood
880 million people worldwide spend part of their time collecting fuelwood or producing charcoal, many of them women.
FAO State of the World’s Forests (2020)
About 50% of the wood extracted from forests is used for energy, mostly for cooking, boiling water and heating:
- 17% of this converted to charcoal.
- The use of sustainably sourced wood for charcoal production is low.
The production and use of fuelwood and charcoal produces emissions of up to 2,400 million tonnes annually.
Most charcoal manufacture in low-income countries uses simple technologies with low efficiencies (10–22 percent). The 3-stone and traditional stoves have low energy efficiency.
- Fuel-efficient stove use in households increases charcoal and fuelwood use efficiency and could reduce emissions by over 60%.
Economics
Over 750 million people don’t have access to electricity – they use less than 22 kWh a year.
- These people are not going to use electricity for cooking.
Improved cookstoves provide significant savings annually in Kenya (Berkouwer and Dean, 2019). They cost about 10 days income to buy and save about one month’s income each year for the median household.
Poor households are aware of the benefits of these stoves but they cannot afford the upfront cost to purchase them:
- carbon finance through offset projects overcomes this economic constraint.
Health
3.8 million people will die prematurely this year from household air pollution.
In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can lead to fine particles being 100 times higher than acceptable levels.
Exposure is particularly high among women and young children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth.
Almost 50% of pneumonia deaths in kids under 5 years are caused by breathing soot indoors.
Cookstoves reduce fuel use and indoor air pollution
What is a Cookstove Project?
Cookstove projects replace low efficiency traditional stoves and three stones.
The carbon offset is generated by reducing the use of fuels like wood or charcoal, extracted from existing forests across the project’s area.
This type of project is usually classed under Energy Efficiency (more efficient fuel burning).
Manufactured and/or Supplied
They typically have at their core a program of manufacturing and/or supplying more efficient improved cookstoves.
The cookstoves are provided to the people in the project’s area:
- at local, regional or national scale.
- either free or at a subsidised price.
As most of the firewood and charcoal used is taken from local forests, improved cookstoves are often supplied by REDD+ projects to local people to reduce forest degradation pressures.
Sustainability Beyond Carbon – Cookstoves
Sustainability co-benefits, beyond the carbon, that are associated with the cookstove project type include:
- improved indoor air quality;
- reduced time and effort spent collecting fuel, typically by women and children;
- decreased risk of injury both cooking and collecting firewood, especially to women and children;
- decreased risk of violence while collecting fuel in less secure environments;
- increased time for other activities and tasks such as school, employment, social/cultural;
- decreased degradation of local forests and the associated impacts on biodiversity;
- improved health with potentially lower rates of pneumonia, stroke, heart disease and cancer;
- women and children benefiting directly; and
- employment being created (both directly or indirectly) by using local people and resources as a part of the project.
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Buying carbon offsets from Beyond Neutral is easy
All the projects sold by Beyond Neutral are accredited under either VCS or Gold Standard , so the offset you buy has been created by a project:
- that follows a specific methodology;
- has been verified as having occurred by one of that Standard’s third party verification bodies; and
- is tracked in that Standard’s Registry using a unique serial number from issuance until retirement on your behalf.
