Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General
and UNEP Executive Director, said: "In
addition to meeting the health targets of
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
especially among women and children who
are often the most exposed to indoor air
pollution, the Alliance may have wider and
indeed global benefits."
"Inefficient cooking
stoves are estimated to be responsible for
approximately 25 per cent of emissions of
black carbon, particles often known as soot,
of which 40 per cent is linked to wood burning",
he added.
"According to research
under the UNEP-supported Atmospheric Brown
Cloud (ABC) project, black carbon could
now be responsible for a significant level
of current climate change", explained
Mr. Steiner.
Indeed, recent studies
by the Project ABC team have put the responsibility
at between 10 to 40 per cent of current
climate change.
Emissions of black carbon
may also be accelerating melting rates of
glaciers in mountain ranges such as the
Himalayas, with the dark particles absorbing
sunlight and raising ice temperatures.
In addition, black carbon
- a key component of brown clouds in some
parts of the world - is contributing to
dimming and reducing the amount of sunlight
hitting the ground in polluted parts of
the globe.
For example, some major
cities in Asia may be up to 25 per cent
dimmer or darker than they were half a century
ago. Reductions in visible light may also
be harming agriculture - again with implications
for poverty and combating hunger under the
MDGs.
Areas of UNEP Involvement-
Global Cook Stove Alliance
Rural Energy Enterprise
Development Project
UNEP has around 10 years'
experience working with partners, including
the UN Foundation, in catalyzing the penetration
of renewable energy systems in developing
countries.
The African Rural Energy
Enterprise Development (AREED) - along with
sister initiatives in Brazil and China known
as BREED and CREED, respectively - has also
compiled a number of lessons learned in
terms of cook stoves.
AREED's most successful
project to date has been in Ghana where
start-up funding and support has been provided
to a local company called Toyola Energy.
The company manufactures
a stove which uses charcoal 40 per cent
more efficiently than conventional cook
stoves.
Through AREED, Toyola
and its two founding entrepreneurs first
received business advisory services in order
to formulate its business plan. The plan
was then backed with funding totaling US$270,000.
Mr. Steiner said: "From
its beginnings as a simple tree-sheltered
operation in a community outside Ghana's
capital Accra, Toyola Energy has grown dramatically,
increasing sales from 3,000 to over 35,000
units per annum within four years."
"By 2010 the company
had supplied over 50,000 households in six
regions of Ghana with improved energy-efficient
stoves and expanded their market to neighbouring
countries," he added.
The company has also
generated 200 jobs, directly and indirectly
while its stoves have reduced C02 emissions
by around 15,000 tonnes annually.
Mr. Steiner said there
were multiple factors behind the company's
success which may be key to similar successes
under the new Alliance. These include:
A highly motivated entrepreneur
with a vision and determination to succeed;
Capacity of the local
AREED partner - the Kumasi Institute of
Technology and Environment working in close
collaboration with the international energy
enterprise investor E+Co to deliver high
quality business development services;
A large potential market
The ability of the entrepreneur
to communicate with rural people, cultivate
and retain the trust of individual households,
and develop innovative marketing and sales
skills.
Other key factors include
identifying a partner such as UNEP with
the ability to raise donor awareness and
co-funding as well as provide policy reforms
needed to assist small- to medium-sized
enterprises.
Strong government support
is necessary and must focus on: a) creating/expanding
markets for cook stoves, and b) identifying
and removing barriers to energy enterprise
development and growth;
Multiple donors that
may be active in a country should carefully
coordinate amongst themselves at all stages
in the project/programme design cycle to
avoid conflicts, enhance complementarities/build
synergies;
An effective and efficient
mechanism for monitoring and evaluating
enterprise performance needs to be put in
place, continuously and periodically feeding
back lessons learned into progressive improvements
in tools and services rendered to entrepreneurs.
Solar Loan Experience
in India - Making it Affordable
Clean energy systems,
including more efficient cook stoves, can
be too expensive for the rural poor despite
fuel savings, despite the multiple health
and environmental benefits.
A cook stove can cost
US$0.80 to US$5 and in some cases much more
which can be too costly for someone living
on less than US$2 a day.
UNEP was confronted
with a similar reality when looking to bring
solar power to rural India where at the
time many banks considered loans to the
rural poor too risky.
With support from the
UN Foundation and the Shell Foundation,
this project brought down the cost of solar
loans to an affordable price.
Between 2003 and 2008,
there were 100,000 stoves in areas with
no electricity grid which were able to acquire
solar power and the initiative proved so
successful it is now self-financing. Today
20 banks with networks of 2,000 branches
are offering competitive solar loans.
The success of the initiative
shows that well targeted investments and
strong partnerships can prove transformational.
Similar strategies,
either via banks or through such initiatives
as Bangladesh's Grameen Shakti's microfinance
project for solar heating, could be useful
in scaling-up the use of more efficient
cook stoves.
As the Ghanaian AREED
project has shown, spin-offs include local
employment prospects. In the case of the
Grameen initiative, some 20,000 "green"
jobs, many of which have been for women,
have been generated and are expected to
reach 100,000 by 2015.
Cook Stoves and Climate
Science
This new initiative
offers an opportunity to also advance the
science of black carbon as it relates to
environmental change.
UNEP's Project ABC,
which is led by Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan
of the Scripps Institution in La Jolla,
California, and includes researchers from
countries such as India and China, has established
a network of ABC observatories throughout
the Asia-Pacific region that are now operated
by national scientists. Plans are underway
to extend the network into Africa and beyond.
UNEP is already supporting
a black carbon and cook stoves demonstration
project called "Project Surya"
in rural areas of India.
Surya aims to provide
sustainable, effective and incentive-based
action plans as well as infrastructure and
technologies to switch to cleaner technologies
such as efficient cooking stoves.
A pilot phase of Project
Surya has been implemented in a rural village
in India with 500 households and a population
of 2,500 people.
The pilot phase, with
Professor Ramanathan as the Principal Investigator
and The Energy Resource Institute (TERI)
as the Indian implementing agency, tested
several available commercial cook stoves
for climate and health benefits and fuel
efficiency using specially designed cell
phones capable of collecting and uploading
data on pollutant exposure and cooking time
periods, wireless technology and the establishment
of indoor air quality sensors as well as
an outdoor climate monitoring tower.
The pilot phase also
included gathering baseline socio-economic
data, and assessing different technological
options for cooking as a way to evaluate
the acceptance of the stoves by the public.
With the successful
implementation of the pilot phase, Surya
is embarking on the demonstration phase,
which will last two years and will involve
two to three rural areas, each with a population
of 15,000 people spread from north to south
India.
Pilot phases of Surya
are also being developed for other developing
countries such as Bhutan, Nepal and Kenya.
It is hoped to link
the declining emissions of black carbon,
both indoor and outdoor, with the reduced
impact on the regional climate as detected
by the monitoring tower and satellites taking
the pollution levels of the atmosphere.
