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Worldwide, more cooking is done on wood fire than ever before, which produces a lot of harmful emissions. There are environmentally friendly and accessible alternatives, but so far they have not been successful in developing countries.<\/p>\n\n
There is a cylindrical stove on the dining table in the small apartment of Esther Boudewijns (27) in Utrecht. The PhD candidate at Maastricht University was on holiday in France this summer, where she took the thing with her. She cheerfully tells how she and her boyfriend baked pancakes on it in the sun. But that is not why it is here now. Boudewijns wants to show the electric stove because she thinks it is crucial to curb the global climate crisis.<\/p>\n\n
Clean cooking initiatives are needed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n \u201cA lot of climate gains can be achieved here with little money,\u201d says Boudewijns, who, as coordinator of the Dutch Spark for Clean Cooking Solutions, tries to bring together Dutch companies, government and development cooperation organizations and stimulate clean cooking initiatives. \u201cYet you hardly hear about it in the climate debate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n With the annual UN climate summit in Egypt less than a week away, Boudewijns hopes that countries and organizations will increase their budgets. \u201cAt the moment, around 130 million euros worldwide are spent on clean cooking every year. While 4.5 billion is needed annually to provide everyone with clean cooking before 2030.\u201d<\/p>\n\n It sounds like an easy climate gain: with a few billion per year – a pittance on the global budget – you can reduce as much CO2 emissions as from aviation as a whole. At the same time, countries, companies and NGOs have been trying for years to reduce cooking with wood and charcoal, with only limited success. Why doesn’t this work?<\/p>\n\n Bad for the health<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Pieter Pauw, assistant professor of climate policy and climate finance at TU Eindhoven, also agrees that clean cooking is underexposed in the climate debate. \u201cIt’s basically a win-win-win-win-win situation,\u201d he says. \u201cClean cooking is good for the climate, for health, for nature, and for development, specifically for women. \u201c<\/p>\n\n Because: cooking on an open fire produces a lot of smoke. That’s unhealthy. Every year, 3.4 million people die from diseases such as lung disease caused by cooking over an open fire, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). People now also often cut down trees and forests for cooking fuel, trees that would otherwise capture and retain CO2. In addition, women and children in African countries in particular are busy cooking, which takes an average of ten hours a week, including foraging for firewood.<\/p>\n\n If people in a village switch to a cleaner stove, this can quickly save half of the emissions. It helps against deforestation and has health benefits. And women and children have more time for other activities, such as education, which benefits the development of a country.<\/p>\n\n What kind of stove then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n There appears to be no shortage of concrete solutions. Boudewijns explains that there are different clean cooking solutions, depending on the situation and the region. Because a farming village in Rwanda is different from a slum in India. The simplest is an improved wood stove, which already leads to more efficient energy consumption and smaller health risks.<\/p>\n\n The cylindrical stove that Boudewijns himself has, from the Dutch company Mimi Moto, works with pellets, a kind of compressed natural material, which is much more efficient. There are also installations that allow farmers to process the manure from their cows into biogas for cooking and manure to feed the land. Bioethanol can actually work in cities.<\/p>\n\n Looking at the 2.4 billion people who now cook with wood, there is also a market for this. And there is political will, at least somewhat. Part of the United Nations Foundation is the Clean Cooking Alliance, founded in 2010 under the wings of Hillary Clinton and led for four years by the Dutch Dymphna van der Lans. Access to energy is one of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and clean cooking is one of them.<\/p>\n\n The Netherlands is also one of the countries that donates a relatively large amount of money to get clean cooking initiatives off the ground. This year, the government increased its ambition to provide not 50 million, but 100 million additional people worldwide with access to renewable energy, through electricity or clean cooking, by 2030.<\/p>\n\n