Insight – Perfect Solution for Climate and Development

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

Fiona Lambe and Patricia Tella

23 April 2011

opinion

Stockholm — Supporting developing countries to scale-up access to sustainable energy for cooking will not only bring positive effects for climate change; it will improve the health and economy of the world’s most vulnerable households.

What’s more, the cost of achieving universal energy access in the coming decades is surprisingly low. It is difficult to imagine, but right now about two billion people, one third of humanity, do not have access to energy for their most basic needs such as cooking, lighting and heating.

Not coincidently, this is the same one third that is currently living in extreme poverty. Access to clean and safe energy for cooking is essential for human development. No country in modern times has managed to reduce poverty and achieve economic development without increasing access to modern forms of energy.

In Sub Saharan Africa, four out of five households do all their cooking over an open fire or using an inefficient wood or charcoal burning stove which exposes them to high levels of smoke and health damaging chemicals. They cook this way because they have very limited choice.

Electricity is either unavailable – only 28 per cent of SSA (excluding South Africa) is electrified – or unaffordable. Since the task of cooking usually falls to women and girls, it is they who face daily exposure to levels of pollution which are estimated to be the equivalent of consuming two packets of cigarettes a day.

The health impact of this exposure is devastating. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), smoke from domestic fires kills nearly two million people each year and sickens millions more.

This is more than three people per minute. It is a death toll almost as great as that caused by dirty water and poor sanitation and Aids, and greater than malaria. Without systematic changes, household biomass use will result in an estimated 8.1 million Lower Respiratory Infection (LRI) deaths among young children in sub-Saharan Africa alone between 2000 and 2030.

If indoor air pollution is responsible for more deaths globally than malaria each year, why don’t we see a global push for energy access similar in profile and funding to the global anti-malaria campaigns?

One answer is that until recently, there has been a marked lack of political will to acknowledge and tackle this glaring problem. This was made blatantly clear in September 2000 when heads of state from all over the world met to agree on eight specific targets for combating poverty, disease, illiteracy, hunger and environmental degradation. The deadline for achieving these eight ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is 2015.

A major reason for this is that Energy Access was completely left out of the picture. Amazingly, there is no Millennium Development Goal on Energy, despite the fact that lack of access to clean and safe energy, especially for cooking, is a major impediment to meeting every one of the MDGs.

The same tiny particles from cooking fires that are linked to more than two million deaths annually are also contributing to climate change.

Black carbon or soot is thought to be the second biggest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, and although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies also produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations. Several studies have indicated that reducing black carbon emissions may be among the most accessible, quick and cost effective actions to mitigate climate warming over the coming decades.

Replacing inefficient cooking devices with cleaner stoves and fuels, while immediately improving the health and well being of the users, could also have a significant positive impact on global warming in a relatively short time frame. This is because, unlike carbon dioxide which can remain in the atmosphere for many decades, black carbon particles generally fall from the sky in days or weeks.

A wide range of new and improved cooking stoves, as well as cleaner fuels are currently being field tested – many of these show great potential for addressing the climate and health problems.

Although a global effort to roll out improved household energy programmes poses a number of challenges, relatively speaking, it is not an expensive project. The International Energy Agency (IEA), in its recently published World Energy Outlook estimated that universal access to clean cooking facilities could be achieved through additional cumulative investment on $56 million in 210-2030. This investment is equivalent to 0.2 per cent of the total projected global energy investment to 2030.

The authors are Associate Researchers at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Stockholm-Sweden.

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