Study underway on COPD in rural non-smokers

Shell Foundation, Envirofit and the Stove That Won't Kill the World's Poor

The Sunday Times, London, writes about The Stove That Won't Kill The World's Poor: NEARLY half the world’s population relies on crude open-fire stoves. They produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-damaging carbon dioxide and are often lethal to their users. According to the World Health Organization, a person dies every 20 seconds from illnesses brought on by inhaling the toxins in the soot from wood, animal dung or other detritus that serves as fuel.

A company funded by the charitable arm of Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant, has developed a cheap and efficient stove that it says could save carbon and lives. Envirofit, a spinout from the University of Colorado, claims that its $20 (£13) stoves cut smoke and toxic emissions by 80%, and halve the amount of fuel that is needed. It aims to sell 10m in the developing world over the next five years.

This has been tried before. In India, where 400,000 people die every year from indoor air pollution, the government gave away 20m new stoves in the late 1990s. The initiative failed because the new kit was of poor quality and there was a lack of aftercare. Most people went back to cooking with their old stoves.

What is different this time, said Simon Bishop, head of policy at the Shell Foundation, is that Envirofit is approaching it as a money-making venture. “Everything we do is about applying business thinking to poverty and environmental issues. There is never going to be enough aid to go around so what you … [...]

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Study underway on COPD in rural non-smokers

The Chest Research Foundation (CRF) of India, a respiratory health research and education body set up in 2002, has initiated what it says is the world's first study to locate the cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in non-smokers. The Government of India Ministry of Health and Welfare says India has 17 million living with COPD, a number that is estimated to go up to 22 million by 2016, according to a story in the Mint.
The study is being conducted in collaboration with the Imperial College of London.

While obstructive airways diseases are typically considered an after-effect of rapid urbanization, the pressures of modern living and ignorance, new studies have established that a substantial number of COPD patients were exposed to indoor air pollution due to smoke from biomass fuel such as firewood, CRF director Sundeep Salvi said.

Around 70% of households in India, especially in rural regions, use biomass fuel for cooking. “This has actually led our research to focus on the rural population and the spread of the disease among non-smokers,” said Salvi.

Of the patients with COPD, around 40% are non-smokers, but Salvi said this number could increase as nearly half the world’s population is exposed to biomass fuel.

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Black Carbon emissions from India up 51%

Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab led by atmospheric scientist Surabhi Menon have taken a further step in making the linkage between black carbon or soot and glacier melting. A Berkley Lab report says Previous studies have shown that black carbon can have a powerful effect on local atmospheric temperature. “Black carbon can be very strong,” Menon says. “A small amount of black carbon tends to be more potent than the same mass of sulfate or other aerosols.”

Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers. “Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt,” says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “Most of the change in snow and ice cover—about 90 percent—is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum.” Menon and her collaborators used two sets of aerosol inventories by Indian researchers to run their simulations; their results were published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. According to the report, Black carbon, which is caused by incomplete combustion, is especially prevalent in India and China; satellite images clearly show that its levels there have … [...]

Read More..climbed dramatically in the last few decades. The main reason for the increase is the accelerated economic activity in India and China over the last 20 years; top sources of black carbon include shipping, vehicle emissions, coal burning and inefficient stoves.

Market Solutions to Combat Indoor Air Pollution

A recent GVEP International report titled Cookstoves and Markets: Experiences, Successes and Opportunities of December 2009 takes a look at the full horizon of cookstoves, ranging from development, marketing and commercializing of efficient cookstoves to reducing Indoor Air Pollution that leads to one death every 20 seconds.

In a comprehensive overview of Shell Foundation’s efforts to develop enterprise based solutions to the challenge of Indoor Air Pollution, Richard Gomes from Shell Foundation says that 80,000 cookstoves sold by program partner Envirofit would improve the livelihood, health, social and economic status of over 300,000 people in Southern Indian states. In addition, these stoves would, over their 5-year lifetime, add up to over Rs 500 million of savings for India’s lowest-income consumers and save over 10 million hours not spent gathering fuel. This, says Gomes, is money kept in the hands of the poor and hours saved that can be better spent on education, family time or personal enterprise efforts.

The 80,000 cookstoves alone could keep over 580,000 tons of CO2 and over 114,000 kg of black carbon from entering the atmosphere. Envirofit cookstoves’ combustion technology reduces 1 ton of greenhouse gasses per stove annually and requires 50% less biomass fuel. According to Gomes, one of the challenges is to make the stoves affordable to users at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid with incomes as low as US $2 a day. The key to overcoming this problem is

According to Menon’s data, black carbon emitted in India increased by 46 percent from 1990 to 2000 and by another 51 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Tackling one of the Big 'Three A's'

By Simon Bishop

One way of categorising the many challenges faced by people and organisations trying to sell improved cookstoves - ones that significantly reduce smoke and fuel use - at scale is the 'Three A's' - Awareness, Availability and Affordability:

Awareness - Often going to a village in India and saying "There is this thing called Indoor Air Pollution (IAP)" is like going there in 1984 and saying "there is this thing called AIDS". Almost no one understands the health risks or that improved cookstoves represent a solution.

However, black carbon’s effect on snow is not linear. Menon’s simulations show that snow and ice cover over the Himalayas declined an average of about one percent from 1990 to 2000 due to aerosols that originated from India. Her study did not include particles that may have originated from China, also known to be a large source of black carbo

Availability - This covers the entire supply-chain, from R&D, manufacturing, marketing, selling, delivering to after-sales service; all have their challenges.

Affordability - This relates to people's ability to be able to afford a stove and if they cannot, then perhaps to the provision of microfinance so that they can pay in installments over several months, thus making the purchase more viable.

This last challenge got a boost this week from a report published by Monitor Inclusive Markets, 'Stretching the Fabric of MFI Networks Report'. It outlines the challenges of trying to sell non-financial products - like solar lanterns, water purifiers and stoves - to … [...]

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