On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce a significant commitment to a group working to address the problem, with a goal of providing 100 million clean-burning stoves to villages in Africa, Asia and South America by 2020.
The United States is providing about $50 million in seed money over five years for the project, known as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seeks to award a five-year $100 million Cooperative Agreement, Supportive Environments for Healthy Households and Communities. Approximately 20 percent of the proposed work will focus on indoor air quality. The RFA lists “increased use of alternatives to cooking with biomass fuels using traditional stoves and/or increased use of housing improvements to improve indoor air quality” as a key environmental health intervention.
What’s more important: reducing fuel consumption or reducing emissions of black carbon and other toxic gases?
The answer is, of course, both, but designing a stove that meets the highest current ratings in emissions reduction and energy consumption at a reasonable cost has so far proven elusive.
Coming up with the right standards will be critical to getting cookstove projects to scale, especially since carbon-credit financing will be vital for some projects to make financial sense, says Dean Still of the Aprovecho Research Center.
The IPCC and the climate change movement are missing the boat on a crucial fix.
Why black carbon abatement is not one of the central topics of discussion by the climate change movement is a mystery to me given the findings in this report.
BEIJING (AFP) More than two million Chinese youths die each year from health problems related to indoor air pollution, with nearly half of them under five years of age, state media cited a government study as saying.
The study released by the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said indoor pollution levels can often be 5-10 times higher than those measured in the nation’s notoriously bad outdoor air, the China News Service said.