Improved Clean Cookstoves, a climate justice solution

The World Bank has been increasing its financing to the clean cooking sector. Over the last seven years, between July 2015 and June 2022, the World Bank provided about US$562 million for clean or improved cooking, to support 43 million people across 30 access-deficit countries. Catalyzing the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program’s (ESMAP) Clean Cooking Fund (CCF), the World Bank continues to hold clean cooking as a corporate priority and aims to support access for up to 100 million people in 2022–2026 through mobilizing political commitment, scaling up investments, and promoting innovations.

In 2020, 2.4 billion people cooked with traditional polluting fuels and technologies worldwide. The associated premature deaths from household air pollution totaled nearly 3.2 million annually, mainly affecting women and children. Nonrenewable wood fuels for cooking accounted for a gigaton of CO2 emissions, and burning residential solid fuels comprised 58 percent of black carbon emissions. The cost of inaction for health, gender, and climate/environment is $2.4 trillion annually.

Without accelerated action, the 2022 Tracking Sustainable Development Goal 7 report estimates 2 billion people will not have access to clean cooking technologies in 2030. Progress requires political commitment, investments, knowledge, and innovation centered on the needs of end-users. Priority must be given to improvements of the overall ecosystem.

Improved cookstoves is a climate justice solution. Clean, efficiency, convenience, safety, availability, affordability stove for improving poor families’ live.

Improved cookstove projects are often confused with clean cooking schemes. But whereas the latter help households transition away from a polluting fuel to a cleaner one, like gas or, even solar, improved cookstoves simply hand out more efficient devices still powered by the same fuel, in this case firewood.

The premise is that giving poor households better-designed stoves makes them consume less firewood resulting in fewer carbon emissions. That greenhouse gas prevented from being released into the atmosphere is then converted into carbon offsets that corporations, governments and individuals can buy to compensate their own emissions.