In Haiti, reforestation should be part of rebuilding process

February 1, 2010 · 0 comments

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

Presidents, rock stars and business leaders from around the world are pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Haiti, which is great.

But they are making a potentially disastrous mistake — focusing too much on bricks, and too little on trees.

I was alerted to this problem in a conversation with Carlos Morales Troncoso, vice president and foreign minister of the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. No other country has been more directly affected than the Dominican Republic by the flood of Haitian evacuees following the Jan. 12 earthquake that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people in Haiti.

Morales Troncoso was in Miami, on his way back from an international conference in Montreal, where the United States, France and more than a dozen other major nations kicked off a 10-year plan for the reconstruction of Haiti. And the Dominican foreign minister was not impressed by what he heard at the meeting: There was too much talk about rebuilding government offices, schools and hospitals, and too little about planting trees, he told me.

“What’s the point of rebuilding Port-au-Prince, or moving it south, if we don’t reforest Haiti?,” he asked. “Where are they going to get their water from? Where are they going to farm? It makes no sense to rebuild a country that won’t have trees.”

Haiti has long been the poorest country in the hemisphere, to a large extent because of deforestation, he reminded me. Early in the 20th century, about 60 percent of Haiti’s landscape was covered with forests. But since then, Haitians have cut down nearly 99 percent of the trees in the country to use them as firewood or charcoal for cooking.

…

But Morales Troncoso told me that the explanation is much simpler: Dominican Republic governments started subsidizing natural-gas cooking stoves to peasants nearly 50 years ago, so that they would not use wood or charcoal for cooking.

“The first measure of [late president Joaquin] Balaguer in 1966 was to shut down all sawmills, and to start subsidizing natural-gas stoves to the poor,” he said. “Haiti needs a massive plan to give natural-gas stoves to the poor, hand-in-hand with a scientific reforestation program.”

Link to complete article – http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/andres-oppenheimer/story/1455503.html

Voice of America – Breathing Easier: The Art of Stove Making

February 1, 2010 · 0 comments

For more than 30 years, the Aprovecho Research Center has been designing cleaner, low-cost cooking stoves for the developing world.

More than three billion people are at risk from indoor air pollution because of the heating or cooking fuels they use. Most live in Africa, India and China. They use biomass fuels like wood, crop waste, animal waste or coal. These solid fuels may be the least costly fuels available. But they are also a major cause of health problems and death.

StoveTec wood stove

For more than thirty years, the Aprovecho Research Center has been designing cleaner, low-cost cooking stoves for the developing world. Dean Still is the director of the group which is based in the United States. He notes a World Health Organization estimate that more than one and a half million people a year die from breathing smoke from solid fuels.

DEAN STILL: “And half of the people on planet Earth every day use wood or biomass for cooking. These are the people on Earth who have less money, and the richer people use oil and gas. It’s been estimated that wood is running out more quickly than oil and gas. And so it is very important for the poorer people to have very efficient stoves that protect their forests and that protect their health.”

Every year Aprovecho holds a “stove camp” at its testing station in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Engineers, inventors, students and others come together to design and test different methods and materials for improving stoves.

Over the years, the group has made stoves using mud, bricks, sheet metal, clay, ceramics and old oil drums. Most of the stoves look like large, deep cooking pots. They have an opening at the bottom for the fire and a place on top to put a pot.

In the late nineteen seventies, Aprovecho produced a popular stove called the Lorena. The Lorena was very good at reducing smoke and warming homes. But new tests years later found that it was not very efficient. The Lorena used twice as much wood as an open fire, and took much longer to heat food.

Since then, Dean Still says they have experimented with countless other designs.

DEAN STILL: “Our goal is to make a very inexpensive stove — let’s say five dollars — that makes very, very little smoke, so it’s safe for health, diminishes global warming and diminishes deforestation. And so it’s an ongoing problem to work on.”

Aprovecho has now partnered with a stove manufacturer in China. The company is making Aprovecho’s first mass produced stoves. They are said to use forty to fifty percent less wood than an open fire, and produce fifty to seventy-five percent less smoke. A company called StoveTec is selling them through its Web site for less than ten dollars. Dean Still says that more than one hundred thousand have been sold so far.

Source – http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2010-01-31-voa2.cfm

Nepal – International Workshop on Domestic Biogas, Dec. 2009

January 28, 2010 · 0 comments

Source – HEDON News, Jan 2010

SNV Netherlands Development Organisation and Asian Development Bank (ADB) organized the International Workshop on Domestic Biogas in Kathmandu, Nepal during the period November 10-12, 2009. One hundred and fifty representatives of private and civil society organisations, government institutions, knowledge centres, development agencies and international donors from 25 countries in Asia, Africa, North and Central America and Europe participated in the workshop.

The objective of the International Workshop was to intensively exchange knowledge and experience between practitioners, experts and policy makers on the dissemination of domestic biogas plants. The core theme of the workshop was ‘How to improve and scale up practices?’

Workshop report – http://www.hedon.info/docs/SNV_WorkshopReport_Nepal2009.pdf (pdf, 2.98MB)

Free-lance marketing agents gain ground in Zimbabwe

January 28, 2010 · 0 comments

Market testing of the Aprovecho Rocket stove also known as Stovetec was conducted in Harare between August and October, 2009.  The stove was received with great enthusiasm, both by end-users and some enterprising people who are now marketing it.  Frequency of stove use was observed to be very high among the sampled households, most of who switched to it completely.

Different size pots in current use are easily accommodated, and the skirt fits snugly with no hitches. The majority of users reported savings in the amount of firewood used as the most important benefit. Many reported a three-fold saving of wood when using the new stove. Besides, customers see it as the most ideal solution in the face of frequent power cuts.

Other benefits include quick cooking, aesthetic appeal, heat retention, a controllable fire, space heating and convenience, (one can cook while seated in a chair).  By the end of 2009, the cumulative number of sales by free-lance marketing agents had increased to 90, and the marketing effort continues to date. They each have identified a target market.

One focuses on a network of church members, where she is a member herself. Another is a recently graduated marketing student who sells to staff members at her work place. The third channels sales through a social club where he is a member and the fourth is targeting corporates and other institutional buyers.  The requested support from the ProBEC office includes end-user leaflets, promotional flyers and logistical support for demonstrations and promotional activities.

Source – http://www.probec.org

Chile – Effect of gas and kerosene space heaters on indoor air quality

January 28, 2010 · 0 comments

J Air Waste Manag Assoc. 2010 Jan;60(1): 98-108.

Effect of gas and kerosene space heaters on indoor air quality: a study in homes of Santiago, Chile.

Ruiz PA, Toro C, Cáceres J, López G, Oyola P, Koutrakis P. School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile.  pabloruiz@med.uchile.cl

The impact of outdoor and indoor pollution sources on indoor air quality in Santiago, Chile was investigated.  Toward this end, 16 homes were sampled in four sessions.  Each session included an outdoor site and four homes using different unvented space heaters (electric or central heating, compressed natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and kerosene).

Average outdoor fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations were very high (55.9 microg x m(-3)), and a large fraction of these particles penetrated indoors. PM2.5 and several PM2.5 components (including sulfate, elemental carbon, organic carbon, metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) were elevated in homes using kerosene heaters. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ultrafine particles (UFPs) were higher in homes with combustion heaters as compared with those with electric heaters or central heating.

A regression model was used to assess the effect of heater use on continuous indoor PM2.5 concentrations when windows were closed.  The model found an impact only for kerosene heaters (45.8 microg m(-3)).

Biomass smoke exposures: health outcomes measures and study design

January 25, 2010 · 0 comments

Inhal Toxicol. 2010 – Feb; 22(2):108-12.

Biomass smoke exposures: health outcomes measures and study design.

Noonan CW, Balmes JR. Center for Environmental Health Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA curtis.noonan@umontana.edu

Epidemiological studies of biomass smoke health effects have been conducted in a variety of settings and with a variety of study designs. The Health Effects Workgroup discussed several approaches for the investigation of health effects in communities exposed to wood smoke from nearby wildland fires, intentional agricultural burning, or residential biomass burning devices such as woodstoves or cookstoves. This presentation briefly reviews observational and intervention studies that have been conducted within these exposure settings. The review is followed by a summary of discussion points among the workgroup members with particular emphasis on study design and the use of biomarkers for assessing outcomes in biomass smoke-exposed populations.

New approaches to performance testing of improved cookstoves

January 25, 2010 · 0 comments

 Environ Sci Technol. 2010 Jan 1;44(1):368-74.

New approaches to performance testing of improved cookstoves.

Johnson M, Edwards R, Berrueta V, Masera O. Department of Epidemiology, School of Medicine, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-3957, Interdisciplinary Group for Appropriate Rural Technology (GIRA), Patzcuaro 61609, Mexico, and Center for Ecosystems Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Morelia 58190, Mexico.

Monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstove performance is a critical factor in program success; however, consistent evidence indicates water boiling tests and controlled cooking tests are not representative of stove  performance during daily cooking activities, and there is no ability to link these tests to kitchen performance tests during normal daily cooking activities. Since emissions from cookstoves contribute heavily to regional estimates of carbonaceous aerosols and other short-lived greenhouse species and given the current importance of stove performance tests as a basis for global climate prediction models and IPCC inventories, improvements in performance testing are critical to derive more representative estimates.

Here real-time combustion efficiencies and emissions rates from daily burn cycles of open fires and improved stoves in Mexico are used to propose a new approach to stove performance testing, using simple and economical measurement methods, based on replication of the distribution of emission rates and combustion efficiencies seen during daily cooking activities in homes.

This approach provides more relevant information for global climate models and inventories, while also providing a means to recreate representative emissions profiles in a laboratory setting for technical analyses. On the basis of emission rates and combustion efficiencies during normal daily cooking, we suggest performance criteria that can be used as benchmarks for laboratory testing of improved stoves in the absence of site-specific information, although requiring confirmation by field testing during daily cooking activities. PMID: 19950918 [PubMed – in process]

250-mln-yr Old Mass Extinction Linked to Lung Cancer in China

January 25, 2010 · 0 comments

A new study has shown that the volcanic eruptions thought responsible for Earth’s largest mass extinction 250 million years ago has been linked to unusually high rates of lung cancer in a particular area of China.

The study shows for the first time that the high silica content of coal in one region of China, which may have been released by volcanic eruptions 250 million years ago, may be interacting with volatile substances in the coal to cause unusually high rates of lung cancer.

The study, by scientist David Large and colleagues, note that parts of China’s Xuan Wei County in Yunnan Province have the world’s highest incidence of lung cancer in nonsmoking women – 20 times higher than the rest of China.

Women in the region heat their homes and cook on open coal-burning stoves that are not vented to the outside.

Scientists believe that indoor emissions from burning coal cause cancer, but are unclear why the lung cancer rates in this region are so much higher than other areas.

Earlier studies show a strong link between certain volatile substances, called PAHs, in coal smoke and lung cancer in the region.

The scientists found that coal used in parts of Xuan Wei County had about 10 times more silica, a suspected carcinogen, than US coal.

Silica may work in conjunction with PAHs to make the coal more carcinogenic, they indicate.

The scientists also found that this high-silica coal was formed 250 million years ago, at a time when massive volcanic eruptions worked to deposit silica in the peat that formed Xuan Wei’s coal.

Source – http://www.medindia.net/news/view_main_print_new.asp

Lung Cancer in ‘Never-Smokers’: A Unique Entity

January 25, 2010 · 0 comments

ONCOLOGY. Vol. 24 No. 1 2010

Lung Cancer in ‘Never-Smokers’: A Unique Entity

By Anakiraman Subramanian,  Ramaswamy Govindan, 

 Lung cancer in “never-smokers” constitutes only a small proportion of patients with lung cancer. Nevertheless, the topic has recently attracted a good deal of attention. Initially this was due to the fact that never-smokers with lung cancer had better outcomes with epidermal growth factor receptor–tyrosine kinase (EGFR-TK) inhibitors, compared to tobacco smokers with lung cancer. More recently the identification of molecular changes unique to lung cancer in never-smokers has generated further interest in this disease. These findings have the potential to enhance our knowledge of lung cancer biology and lead to the development of new, more effective treatments for lung cancer. In this review, we summarize the existing body of knowledge on lung cancer in never-smokers.

Cooking Fumes—Exposure to cooking oil fumes and coal burning has been studied extensively in Chinese women with lung cancer. In a case-control study of 672 women with lung cancer and 735 healthy controls, exposure to rapeseed oil fumes was associated with increased risk for lung cancer (relative risk [RR] = 2.6; 95% CI = 1.3–5.1).[8] Coal fumes from cooking and indoor heating have been reported to be associated with increased risk of lung cancer in the Chinese population. In a case-control study of 846 lung cancer patients and 1,740 population controls from rural China, exposure to indoor coal fumes over a period of 30 years was associated with an increased risk for lung cancer (odds ratio = 1.29; 95% CI = 1.03–1.61).[9] Several other case-control studies have confirmed the increased risk for lung cancer in never-smokers exposed to cooking oil fumes and coal fumes (reviewed in reference 10).

Complete article – http://www.cancernetwork.com/cme/article/10165/1512059?verify=0

Solar Cookers International to Help Haitian Families

January 25, 2010 · 0 comments

Solar Cookers International (SCI), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1987, announced the launch of the Haiti Project, which aims to send one complete solar cooking kit to at least 200 Haitian families that were devastated by the recent earthquake. The initial fundraising goal for this project is $8,000.

Even before the disaster, SCI ranked Haiti as one of the top twenty countries in the world where solar cooking is poised to be very successful and tremendously beneficial. The recent earthquake, in combination with the country’s already scarce fuel and power resources, spells an immediate need for solar cooking training and supplies. Forty dollars is enough to provide one family with a solar cooker, a cooking pot, and a water pasteurization indicator (WAPI), a device that shows when solar-heated water has been rid of pathogens and is safe to drink. “With Haiti’s abundant sunshine, each solar cooker will provide a fuel-free means of cooking many meals, reducing the burden to buy charcoal or fuel-wood in this heavily deforested country, both now and into the future,” said Bev Blum, SCI’s interim Executive Director.

Solar cooking projects have been ongoing in Haiti for decades, so local groups who can facilitate training and distribution are already in place. Unfortunately, at least one confirmed death among SCI’s network was the leader of a solar cooking program and one warehouse filled with much-needed solar cooking supplies was destroyed. SCI is working with Sun Ovens International and Friends of Haiti Organization (FOHO) to send as many solar cookers as possible to Haiti in a shipping container in the coming weeks. Once again, the goal of the Haiti Project is to send enough supplies for at least 200 families. Additional solar cooking supplies will be distributed if surplus funds are collected.

Solar Cookers International (SCI) is widely considered the world pioneer in advancing solar cooking through its product development and field training experience. SCI has improved the lives of tens of thousands through the development, distribution and training of solar cooking systems in Africa. SCI helped invent an innovative “water pasteurization indicator,” a simple, life-saving device that measures when solar-heated water is clear of all disease-causing microbes.

Source – Sacramento Press

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