Bangladesh – Fighting indoor air pollution

June 16, 2009 · 0 comments

EXPERTS at a workshop on Monday identified indoor air pollution as a major cause of death of people in Bangladesh. According to them, roughly four percent of the diseases are attributable to it. Women and children who usually stay longer inside the houses are most exposed to polluted air. About two-thirds of the deaths are under-five children who suffer from pneumonia and acute respiratory infections. In adults, particularly women, the exposure is associated with TB, asthma, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer. According to a study, indoor air pollutants infect almost 88 percent of the people.

It is estimated that 92 percent of households in the country use crop residue, wood or cowdung for cooking. The indoor burning of these substances contributes to morbidity and mortality. There are also some other pollution sources. Carbon monoxide and polycyclic organic matter, formaldehyde and other toxic substances gradually accumulate inside the houses for lack of proper ventilation. The concentration of harmful particles in the kitchen air in Bangladesh is reportedly 10-15 percent higher than at outdoors. While outdoor concentration is about three times the WHO standard in urban areas, it is 30-35 times indoors. Air pollution is the highest in slum houses.

Indoor air pollution is a serious problem and poses threats to public health. It needs to be addressed seriously and given due importance in the national health policy. Most of the people do not seem to have knowledge about indoor pollution, its causes and remedies. People with clear ideas can effectively fight the problem. People must be made aware of the importance of ventilation. Awareness raising campaigns followed by actions has become most important for fighting indoor pollution.

Source – The New Nation

SolSource 3-in-1: An Alternative Energy Solution

June 16, 2009 · 0 comments

solsourceIn rural regions of the Himalayas, a new lightweight, low cost, portable solar cooker called the SolSource 3-in-1 is poised to transform the health and prosperity of entire villages. The device, which can replace the hazardous traditional biomass-burning stove as a means for cooking and heating the home, can also use its own waste thermal energy to generate enough electricity to light a home at night, charge cell phones and power other small devices. And because the cooker’s unique design targets specific local needs and materials, its manufacture and distribution could provide a new economic future for communities in transition from agricultural to manufacturing economies.

The satellite dish-shaped SolSource, developed by US-based nonprofit One Earth Designs, is elegant in its simplicity. Reflective nomadic tent material, stretched across a bamboo frame, concentrates sunlight from a large area inward toward a focal point where the user can place a pot stand for cooking, a thermoelectric device for generating electricity (at a lower cost than a photovoltaic panel), a heat module for heating the home, a solar water disinfector for treating drinking water, or a thermal battery for cooking after dark. These interchangeable parts are each about the size of a laptop computer, and the main platform is easily folded and disassembled for portability.

The SolSource generates enough heat at its focal point to bring a kettle of water to boil in about five to seven minutes – about the same amount of time as conventional gas stoves in homes throughout the developed world. While it is in use, the device generates heat to warm the home, and can create and store about 15 watt hours of electricity, or enough to power the lights for about seven hours. This is adequate for the villagers’ needs, but upgrading to a larger thermoelectric device would easily increase the energy capacity, says One Earth Designs co-founder and COO Catlin Powers.

Powers and co-founder/CEO Scot Frank, both 23, and project chief engineer Amy Qian, 20, worked with Himalayan university students to collect direct feedback from villagers across the region to inform the design of the SolSource 3-in-1. Crowd-sourcing input on the design was particularly important to this project, because although the villagers were already familiar with solar cookstoves introduced throughout the region via various government and NGO initiatives, these devices weren’t fulfilling the nomadic communities’ unique needs.

“In many cases, the villagers and nomads are quite disappointed with the current solar cookers available,” says Frank. Many of these stoves, he explains, are made from concrete and glass components, both of which are easily broken during distribution and everyday use, yet the rural communities lack the expertise and tools needed to repair broken devices. The stoves, which weigh about 95 kg, aren’t easily portable, so they hinder the villagers’ traditional lifestyles. And the stoves are designed for cooking only, so the villagers still rely on biomass burning to heat their homes, a need that accounts for most of the region’s fuel use.

Read More – World Changing

USAID/Peru – Healthy Kitchen/Healthy Stove Pilot Project

June 15, 2009 · 0 comments

Indoor Air Pollution/Energy

USAID; Winrock. December 2008. Peru Healthy Kitchen/Healthy Stove Pilot Project. (pdf, 2.30MB)

The energy team of the USAID Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade and the environmental health team of the Bureau for Global Health jointly supported the “Healthy Kitchen/Healthy Stove” pilot project. The project developed a unique model for the manufacture and distribution of improved wood stoves among poor rural indigenous communities; creating local organizational capacity for raising awareness about the health risks of indoor smoke among the families of 33 communities; producing and supplying the wood stove technology; and enabling widespread community access through an innovative finance scheme.

WHO – Evaluating household energy and health interventions

June 15, 2009 · 0 comments

whoThis catalogue of methods discusses evaluation options in the areas of Adoption, Market development, Performance, Pollution levels and personal exposure, Health and safety, Time, socio-economic and other impacts and Environmental impacts.

It provides methods that range from simple questionnaires to complex monitoring techniques, and outlines practical issues related to study design, ethical considerations, data analysis and reporting.

Ultimately, this catalogue of methods is intended to help governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations and universities involved with household energy and health interventions develop an evaluation strategy appropriate to their goals and organizational capacities.

Link to full-text – http://www.who.int/indoorair/publications/methods/en/index.html

Fort Collins-based nonprofit Trees, Water & People wins sustainability prize

June 11, 2009 · 0 comments

Nonprofit chosen from among 107 proposals from 36 countries

Fort Collins-based Trees, Water & People has won a $1 million prize for sustainability from an international mining company, allowing it to expand two programs in Central America and Haiti.

“I am shocked,” Stuart Conway, Trees, Water & People co-founder, said in a telephone interview in Montreal, Canada, where he accepted the Rio Tinto Prize for Sustainability at the International Economic Forum of the Americas conference Tuesday.

“I know we do good work, but the competition was so tough I thought it would be hard to win. But it makes me feel good for sure,” Conway said.

Trees, Water & People was chosen for the Rio Tinto Prize for Sustainability from among 107 proposals from 36 countries, said Tony Shaffer, spokesman for Rio Tinto’s U.S. and South American interests.

The 11-year-old nonprofit plans to use the windfall – distributed over three years – to expand its community reforestation and cookstove programs in Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti.

The cookstove program provides energy-efficient ventilated cook stoves that help reduce exposure to indoor cook smoke.

Respiratory problems caused by exposure to smoke from unventilated cooking fires kill more than 1.6 million women and children a year in developing countries, Conway said.

Trees, Water & People with local partners in Haiti, build stoves from clay, rice husks and molasses that sell for about $5.

An earlier model that sold for $10 was too expensive for about 60 percent of residents who live on about $1 a day, Conway said, leading the company to look for less-expensive ways to manufacture the stoves.

Part of the Rio Tinto prize money will be used to make more stoves and train Haitians to manufacture them throughout the country.

“It will help develop micro-entrepreneurs,” Conway said, “which makes it so much more sustainable in the long run.”

The stoves use up to 50 percent less wood and reduce the risk of respiratory disease caused by inhaling wood smoke.

As a result, they reduce the demand for firewood in parts of the world that are severely deforested and contribute to better health for women and children who are the most likely to be affected by indoor air pollution.

The reforestation program in Nicaragua plants thousands of trees and helps farmers establish tree nurseries to produce a sustainable supply of firewood, Conway said.

At current rates of deforestation, Trees, Water & People predicts Central America’s native forests could be gone by 2050.

By teaching rural Central Americans how to grow trees in self-sufficient nurseries, new trees are helping to replenish the forest, stabilize soil, protect water supplies and produce a sustainable supply of firewood. The nurseries also provide new sources of income for farmers and their families.

The award also saves Trees, Water & People from having to cut some international projects in the second half of the year, Conway said.

Trees, Water & People employs about 10 people at its offices at 633 Remington St. and another 30 who work for the company in Central America and Haiti, and had a budget of $1.55 million, according to its annual report.

“This was very timely, thank you very much,” Conway said. “Being a nonprofit, we are affected when individuals donate less, when foundations have less in endowments. This will allow us to maintain our programs and expand some.”

Proposals for the award are reviewed by an international panel of experts unaffiliated with Rio Tinto.

David Anderson, chairman of the prize adjudication panel and director of Guelph Institute for the Environment at the University of Guelph, Canada, said Trees, Water & People embodied the spirit of the prize.

“We are pleased that the work that Trees, Water & People is already doing with local communities on two continents to protect, conserve and manage the natural resources upon which their long-term well-being depends will now be boosted with the award of the Rio Tinto Prize for Sustainability,” he said in a statement.

Elaine Dorward-King, Rio Tinto’s global head of health, safety and environment, said in a statement the Rio Tinto Prize was designed to recognize nonprofit, civil and non-government organizations for significant contributions to the goals of economic, environmental and social sustainability.

Rio Tinto is an international mining group headquartered in the United Kingdom, combining Rio Tinto PLC, a publicly traded company, and Rio Tinto Limited, a public company listed on the Australian Securities Ex-change.

“Sustainable development is a critical part of our business model,” Shaffer said.

The award was part of Alcan, a company acquired by Rio Tinto in 2007.

Additional Facts

For information on Trees, Water & People, visit www.treeswaterpeople.org.

For information about TWP’s “Improved Cookstove Intervention to Assess Changes in Woodsmoke Exposures and Health Status among Nicaraguan Families” project, visit www.cvmbs.colo-state.edu/erhs/Nicaragua

Source – Coloradoan

India – Editorial: the challenge of the chulha

June 10, 2009 · 0 comments

June 9, 2009

About 24 years ago, I was in a house in a small village some distance from Udaipur town in Rajasthan. A government functionary was explaining how an improved chulha (cookstove) worked- they had installed it in the kitchen. At that time, India was waking up to forests being devastated. It was believed then (wrongly, as it turned out) the key reason was poor people cutting trees to cook food. It was also being understood smoke from chulhas was carcinogenic and that women were worst hit by this pollution. The answer was to design improved chulhas- for better combustion and with a chimney.

The woman owner of this improved stove was cooking the day’s meal. I asked if she was happy with what science and government had donated to her. Her answer was simple: “Looks good, does not work. I modified it.” Her problem was that, in this area, women cooked gruel on big utensils. Her home-made original stove was fitted to her diet and her utensils. The improved chulha, with its small opening to streamline the fire, was of little use. When the chulha was designed, nobody asked her what she needed. Nobody explained to her the laws of thermodynamics, so that she could fathom why the stove looked and worked as it did. And nobody was there who could repair or reshape her cookstove. She had simply broken the opening to fit her needs. Carefully calculated combustion in the laboratory of the local university and delivered through a government programme had turned to hot air.

I learnt my most valuable lesson that day. Designing technologies for diversity and affordability is much more complex than sending a man to the moon.

Consider the government’s own statistics. By 1994, some 15 million improved chulhas were introduced across the country. A survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research found, in many cases, the stoves were not appropriately designed or had broken with use; over 62 per cent of the respondents said they did not know who to contact for repairs. No surprise here. Technology deployment in poor and unserviced households is a job the market does badly.

But why am I discussing this moment of development history? Well, cookstoves are back. This time, on the world stage. Science has discovered black carbon-soot-is a key contributor to climate change; these particles warm the air; when they settle on glaciers, the latter melt. So now, soot from chulhas poor households use-burning wood, twigs and cowdung- stands indicted for climate change. A bill has been introduced in the US Congress requiring the country’s environment protection agency to regulate black carbon and direct aid to black carbon reduction projects abroad, including introducing chulhas in some 20 million homes.

Read More – Central Chronicle

Cost-Effective Measures Could Stop Child Pneumonia Deaths

June 10, 2009 · 0 comments

June 9, 2009

Implementing measures to improve nutrition, indoor air pollution, immunization coverage and the management of pneumonia cases could be cost-effective and significantly reduce child mortality from pneumonia, according to a study led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Researchers found that these strategies combined could reduce total child mortality by 17 percent and pneumonia deaths by more than 90 percent.

Pneumonia is a leading cause of death of infants in many developing countries, resulting in 2.2 million deaths each year. The study is published in the June 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins in collaboration with the WHO and other schools of public health, assessed economic aspects of existing child interventions and identified the most efficient pneumonia control strategies. Programs to promote better community-based treatment of pneumonia, promotion of exclusive breastfeeding, zinc supplementation and vaccination for Hib and S. pneumoniae were found to be the most cost-effective interventions. The burning of solid fuels like wood, for cooking and heating, was found to contribute at least 20 percent to the burden of childhood pneumonia.

“The interventions we examined already exist but are not fully implemented in the developing world. In addition, implementation of these interventions do not require a great deal of new infrastructure to carry out,” said Louis Niessen, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health. “Fully funding and implementing these interventions could bring us a big step closer towards reaching the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.”

Majid Ezzati, co-investigator of the study and associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, said that the next step is “to assess how donors and countries currently deliver these interventions and want to progress in the coming years.”

The study was written by Niessen, Anne ten Hove, Henk Hilderink, Martin Weber, Kim Mulholland and Ezzati. The research was supported by grants from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Source – JHU Gazette

Brazil discovers the benefits of efficient cook stoves

June 9, 2009 · 0 comments

brazilThe wood is burnt for cooking and brick making or used for fence production. Today more than eighty percent of the scrubland in Caatinga, an ecologically rich and sensitive area within the Ceara region boasts a biome comprised of trees and bushes up to seven metres in height, has disappeared. However, what remains is still home to around 932 types of plants, 148 types of mammals, 510 bird species and countless insects and other creatures. Unlike the rainforest, Caatinga’s climate is semi-arid and subject to long lasting droughts and a short, but intense rainy season.

Yet until a year or two ago, most Brazilians were unaware of Caatinga’s plight. But then two things happened. The federal government’s new environment minister, Carlos Minc, drew attention to the deforestation spreading more rapidly than that of the Amazon, and announced plans for its conservation and recovery. Some time previous to that, a campaign to abolish the toxic, antiquated cooking habits of Caatinga villagers hit the national news.

Using the power of television, for the first time people all over Brazil heard about efficient cook stove technologies which drastically cut the use of wood as a fuel. Something clicked in the consciousness of Brazilians, as better ovens in the home meant less wood consumption, which in turn spares thousands of trees.

Enter four key players in a story that has blossomed from a small pilot of 20 stoves to a sweeping reform affecting thousands. IDER – Brazil’s Institute for Sustainable Development and Renewable Energy – is the NGO that initiated the program. The Global Village Energy Project (GVEP) is the London based organisation that funded the initial pilot project. The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), an international partnership focused on policies, regulations and financial mechanisms in support of clean energy, provided the cash for the project’s second phase, funding its development to a further 200 stoves. Last but not least is Joaquim Cartaxo, Ceara’s State Secretary for urban and rural development. Cartaxo’s involvement has ensured that, a couple years after the pilot, another 4,000 stoves have been paid for by the state’s government, with investment in a further 18,000 currently under construction. The total funding amounts to over US$4.5 million.

Why did this project succeed, when so many others grind to a halt? One reason is that IDER found a major ally in Cartaxo, a politician who immediately saw the benefits of the cook stoves and took action. Dangerous smoke from basic wood stoves used in many developing countries can cost lives and many people have developed serious lung diseases as a result. Hospitals have to treat villagers for respiratory illnesses and eye infections, which costs public money. Studies from the World Health Organisation say that worldwide two million people per year die from indoor pollution caused by inefficient cook stoves.

By installing efficient cooking stoves, hundreds of thousands of dollars may be saved. Not only will people’s health improve as the project workers scrap the ashen slabs bearing their iron pots perched on rickety props, but local businesses will benefit. The new Brazilian stoves consist of a metallic hob and oven frame surrounded by a case of new brickwork that is laid on site. IDER and their colleagues aim to roll out the mass production of the metallic component while providing income for local masons. The homes that will benefit are occupied by families generally in the poorest section of the populace that are unable to afford this type of equipment themselves.

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