How the other half cooks

Carbon credits with co-benefits

Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Across much of the developing world, open fires fuelled by wood, dung or other biomass are used to cook inside the house.

These stoves have adverse health consequences for households, accelerate local deforestation, and emit significant quantities of carbon dioxide. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that smoke from traditional cookstoves is equivalent to smoking 2 packets of cigarettes a day and is responsible for 4 million excess deaths per year.

Some 128 countries currently lack universal access to clean cooking. Almost 2.5 billion people, around 30% of the worlds population can only cook with heavily polluting stoves, 40% of them are in sub‐Saharan Africa and 55% in developing Asia.

There have been improvements over the past decade. The number of people with no access to clean cooking technologies has declined by 0.5 billion since 2010, an annual rate of improvement of 1.7%. A rapid improvement in access to clean cooking technologies in developing Asia (in particular China, India and Indonesia) outweighed a deterioration in sub‐Saharan Africa.

How big could the cookstove market be?

The IEA estimates that only 39 of the 128 countries without universal access have clean cooking targets in place, and fewer than half of these are targeting achieving it by 2030.

Under the IEA’s Announced Pledges Scenario (APS), it is assumed that all clean cooking targets are met on time and in full. If all the targets are achieved it would still leave 780 million people without access to clean cooking technologies by 2030.

In order to meet the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario, the annual rate of improvement needs to increase from 1.7% to 4.6% - 2.7 times faster. To make progress as rapidly as projected in the NZE Scenario, investment needs to be focused on sub‐Saharan Africa where countries need to improve their historical rate of progress by 15 times.