With open fires and traditional cookstoves causing millions of injuries and deaths annually, a new document from ISO represents a major first step towards defining criteria for clean, efficient and safe cookstoves. The ISO International Workshop Agreement IWA 11:2012, Guidelines for evaluating cookstove performance, is the first document of its type backed by international consensus. Read more
Cooking can be hazardous to your health and to the environment, particularly if you are cooking indoors over an open fire and burning wood and dung, as many people in poor, rural areas of the world do every day. In fact, the World Health Organization says that the smoke and gases from cooking fires in the world's poorest countries contribute to nearly two million deaths a year — that's more than malaria, as our colleague Chris Joyce reported. Read more
During their meeting in Helsinki on 27 June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja discussed topics of interest to both Finland and the United States. “Finland and the United States have many common interests, from security to human rights,” Clinton said. Read more
On May 3, the day after an artful deal to end the diplomatic crisis over Chen Guangcheng, China’s now-famous dissident, unraveled spectacularly, Hillary Rodham Clinton followed a scrum of Chinese ministers around an exhibition of clean cookstoves. These are safer, portable alternatives to the crude stoves used by hundreds of millions of women in the developing world — at grave risk to themselves, their children and the planet. Not long after becoming secretary of state in 2009, Clinton took up the cookstove cause, one of what she describes as “smart power” issues — though skeptical veterans of American foreign policy tend to deride them as soft more than smart. Read more
The key to achieving sustainable economic growth while preserving environmental resources will be new ideas, pragmatism and optimism about “a more prosperous future,” said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a speech on Friday at the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, as it concluded in Rio de Janeiro. Read more
Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly 3 billion people in the developing world – causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and children the most affected. Read more
The UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative represents an important opportunity for the international community to address issues critical to the future of sustainable development, energy access, and economic growth. Expanding the use of efficient and clean energy technologies is a priority of the Obama Administration, domestically and internationally, and increasing energy access is a central challenge facing the world. Read more
Almost three billion people around the world—or 4 out of every 10 individuals—are exposed to high levels of smoke each day from traditional cookstoves. After water, indoor air pollution is the largest environmental threat to health in developing countries. Women and young children bear the brunt of these costs. Further, the reliance of the world’s poor on solid fuels for their cooking needs, in the end, affects us all through the release of carbon dioxide and black carbon that contribute to climate change. Read more
The prices of paraffin, which is used by most Kenyans for cooking and lighting increased by more than Sh17 to Sh95 a litre between January and December last year. Charcoal prices also increased in the same period to Sh49 for every 4 kilogramme. This has pushed most Kenyans to the use of firewood since most of them cannot afford cooking gas whose prices are at least Sh1000 for the 6 kilogramme cylinder. Read more
For much of the developing world, preparing a meal is a one of the most dangerous activities a woman can undertake. She may spend half a day scavenging for fuel to build a fire. She must then spend hours tending the fire. Throughout the process, the home is filled with acrid, toxic smoke that irritates eyes and burns lungs. Read more