Biomass Cookstoves Kill 1.6 Million People Per Year, But They Dont' Have To

A few weeks ago, my fellow Planet Greener Matt McDermott blogged about how transitioning to cleaner burning biomass cookstoves in many developing nations could have a pretty large impact on climate change. This is because existing open-flame stoves release so much black carbon soot, which has been linked to melting glaciers.

It turns out that all that soot also poses huge health problems for the three billion people worldwide who use traditional cookstoves and fires. In fact, these stoves kill around 1.6 million people per year, most of them children, who often develop Acute Lower Respiratory Infections, which develops into fatal pneumonia. Women (since they do most of the cooking and thus have the greatest exposure) are at an increased risk for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COLPD) and lung cancer. Studies also suggest a link between stove use and cataracts, tuberculosis, and heart disease.

"The vast majority of families [in rural Mexico] cook with open fires indoors," explains Dr. Omar R. Masera, a professor in the Center for Ecosystems Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who has co-authored several scientific papers on the health risks of traditional cookstoves. "This means that all the pollutants remain inside the house/kitchen leading to exposure levels up to 100 times higher than the permitted WHO standards for outdoor air pollution."

Dr. Masera oversees the non-profit GIRA, which has launched a program called "Project Patsari," to distribute safer Patsari stoves to families in rural Mexico, an undertaking with several key challenges. "To make safer stoves available to local people, you need to design a stove that has clean combustion, that is affordable, and that works for traditional cooking purposes," he explains. "We had some stoves proposed that don't work for making tortillas, which means they won't get used in these communities." They now have over 3,500 stoves in use and have found that respiratory disease decreases by 30 percent and eye infections by 50 percent in women who use the Patsari stove rather than an open fire, thanks to a 70 percent reduction in indoor air pollution. (They also use half the usual amount of fuel wood.)

GIRA won an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy for their stove program in 2006, one of twenty non-profits around the world that the Ashden Awards have honored for their work on cook stoves. To learn more about the health risks associated with traditional cookstoves and cooking fires, visit BioEnergy Lists or click here to watch a film about GIRA's stove program. You can also email energia@gira.org.mx to learn more about GIRA's "adopt a Patsari" program, where you can donate to bring a Patsari stove to a family in rural Mexico and even offset your own carbon emissions.