New York Times: Biogas Offers Poor Country’s a Cleaner, Safer Fuel

October 25, 2011 · 0 comments

October 25, 2011, New York Times, by Amy Yee

NEPALGANJ, NEPAL — Here’s an unlikely starting point for clean energy: No toilets, and plenty of dung.

In developing countries where domestic animals are ubiquitous and sewage systems rare, biogas technology — in this case methane derived from feces — can provide both valuable fuel and improved sanitation.

Jeet Bhadur Tharu, a farmer in Dalla, Nepal, in his backyard in front of the family latrine, which is connected to an air-tight pit of dung and human excrement that produces biogas for cooking.

Unlike directly burning animal dung, the methane is clean-burning and odorless. And the technology has benign byproducts: reductions in deforestation and disease.

Dalla, a village of a hundred or so mud-walled, thatch-roof huts, clusters along a narrow dirt road a few kilometers from the forests of the Bardiya National Park in southwest Nepal. Buffaloes and cows lounge under thatch lean-tos to escape the hot sun. But unlike typical villages, Dalla’s approximately 550 residents use biogas for cooking in place of wood.

Biogas can also work in urban areas and with human waste. A few hours from Mumbai, a sprawling public toilet complex serving visitors to the temple of the Indian guru Sai Baba generates enough biogas to provide back-up power for the temple complex, which occupies almost a hectare, or two acres.

[click to continue…]

Bookmark and Share

Energy, Gender and Development: What are the Linkages? Where is the Evidence?

October 21, 2011 · 0 comments

Energy, Gender and Development: What are the Linkages? Where is the Evidence? (September 1, 2011). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series

Köhlin, Gunnar, Sills, Erin O., Pattanayak, Subhrendu K. and Wilfong, Christopher.

This report reviews the literature on the links between energy access, welfare, and gender in order to provide evidence on where gender considerations in the energy sector matter and how they might be addressed. Prepared as a background document for the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development, and part of the Social Development Department’s ongoing work on gender and infrastructure, the report describes and evaluates the evidence on the links between gender and energy focusing on: increased access to woodfuel through planting of trees and forest management; improved cooking technologies; and access to electricity and motive energy.

The report’s main finding is that energy interventions can have significant gender benefits, which can be realized via careful design and targeting of interventions based on a context-specific understanding of energy scarcity and household decision-making, in particular how women’s preferences, opportunity cost of time, and welfare are reflected in household energy decisions.

The report focuses on the academic peer-reviewed literature and, although it applies fairly inclusive screening criteria when selecting the evidence to consider, finds that the evidence on many of the energy-gender linkages is often limited. There is thus a clear need for studies to evaluate interventions and identify key design elements for gender-sensitive project design.

NPR – Curbing Cooking Smoke That Kills More People Than Malaria

October 19, 2011 · 0 comments

Environmental hazards sicken or kill millions of people — soot or smog in the air, for example, or pollutants in drinking water. But the most dangerous stuff happens where the food is made — in peoples’ kitchens.

That’s according to the World Health Organization, which saysthat 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.

Burning wood, crop waste, charcoal or dung does the damage, filling homes with smoke and blackening walls. It’s women and children who suffer the most, because they are the ones tending the fires. But it’s not that easy a problem to fix.

 Several scientists from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland are calling attention to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. It brings in celebrities, chefs and politicians to help create awareness for the need for cleaner fuels and better cookstoves.

The technology is easy, but getting the stoves and cleaner fuels to impoverished millions is not. It’s not as simple as saying, OK, buy something cleaner and your life will improve. There are social and economic barriers galore.

Scientists say their role is to do the research to show how much indoor air pollution from stoves they have to cut to make a difference. To tackle pneumonia, for example, research in Guatemala showed that cookstove pollutants had to be cut at least in half to show any real health benefits, according to anarticle in the journal Science, published last week.

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and others say that most people in poor countries who cook with open fires don’t realize what’s happening to their health. “Success has been limited by a number of factors,” they say, “including a lack of awareness of the problem, limited research into the health risks, lack of affordable improved stoves or fuels that reduce exposures to safer levels, and the logistical challenges of solving a problem that affects almost 3 billion of the poorest people on the planet.”

The Global Alliance and the cookstove industry announced last year that they would work together to create a market for better cookstoves, under the aegis of the United Nations. The U.S. government has committed over $50 million. Half of that will go to NIH for research on how much indoor air pollution needs to be reduced to produce real health gains.

Source – NPR, Oct. 18, 2011

USAID – New Research Aims To Reduce Deaths Caused by IAP

October 19, 2011 · 0 comments

New Research Aims To Reduce Deaths Caused by Indoor Air Pollution

October 17, 2011- WASHINGTON, D.C. – The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is supporting the development and evaluation of behavioral approaches to tackle household air pollution. Half of the world’s population cooks with solid fuels on poorly functioning stoves or open fires, primarily using wood or other biomass. Nearly 2 million people, mostly women and children, die each year as a consequence of household air pollution levels that are typically 100 times greater than World Health Organization air quality guidelines.

“Understanding the causes of and solutions for indoor air pollution, a leading cause of respiratory infections, is essential to demonstrate USAID’s commitment to Global Health Initiative goals of protecting women and children, who are disproportionately affected by indoor smoke,” said Dr. Ariel Pablos-Mendez, Assistant Administrator, Global Health with USAID.

Global efforts have focused on creating and testing improved clean cookstoves, switching to higher-quality, lower emission fuels and improved household ventilation as a key Interventions to reduce household air pollution. Though these hold promise to reduce household air pollution evidence-based practical approaches to scaling-up and sustaining these interventions in developing country settings have been limited.

For a household air pollution intervention to be effective, families must use it consistently and correctly. The core user, in this case women who do majority of the cooking in most settings, needs to be motivated to purchase and fully adopt a technology based on their personal preferences, the social norms, knowledge and attitudes in their communities, product affordability and access, and perceived priorities. Adjusting cooking practices can entail a high degree of behavior change which may encourage or hamper overall uptake.

The challenge is how to protect the health and safety of families, honor local cooking traditions and support the effective uptake of clean and efficient household solutions.

USAID is investing in behavioral research to guide the implementation of interventions to reduce pollution exposure. USAID has awarded three grants totaling $1.3 million to Duke University, Impact Carbon in San Francisco, and Seattle-based PATH to investigate the factors that enable families to purchase improved clean cookstoves and use them correctly over a sustained period. The studies will examine institutions and incentives that promote stove acquisition and use and develop and test interventions on how best to introduce new stove technologies, change the home environment, and influence individual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Researchers from the Duke Global Health Institute and Sanford School of Public Policy will carry out research in Uttar Pradesh, India; and PATH and Impact Carbon will conduct studies in Uganda. All of the grantees will work with local partner organizations.

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation, aims to reach 100 million homes by 2020. The US government pledged $50 million and joins other U.S. agencies, other donor countries, host governments, corporate founding partners Morgan Stanley and Shell, academia and civil society in this global effort to address health, safety, environment, women and children.

The Duke Global Health Institute was created to address health disparities at home and around the world, by bringing together Duke faculty from different disciplines to make significant contributions to the prevention and treatment of health problems. PATH is an international nonprofit organization that collaborates with diverse public- and private-sector partners, to provide appropriate health technologies and strategies that change the way people think and act. Impact Carbon works with researchers and practitioners to bring clean-burning and efficient stoves and fuels to people in low income countries.

http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr111017_1.html

To push clean cookstoves, involve the cooks

October 18, 2011 · 0 comments

To push clean cookstoves, involve the cooks, report says

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 13, 2011

(Reuters) – Clean cookstoves that burn more efficiently and channel smoke outside could save millions of lives around the world, but only if the cooks themselves are part of the solution, scientists reported on Thursday.

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (cleancookstoves.org), headed by the United Nations Foundation and championed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seeks to cut down on indoor air pollution in some of the globe’s poorest countries, where the most common way to cook is on an open fire inside the home.

These household cooking fires contribute to 2 million deaths annually, more than are caused by malaria, according to the World Health Organization, which makes this the leading environmental cause of death.

To help change this, some $150 million to $200 million worth of research needs to be done over the next decade to see that clean cookstoves get into the homes of the women most vulnerable to the hazards of indoor pollution, the scientists wrote in the journal Science.

The research should include examinations of respiratory, cardiovascular and cancer risks as well as such life-cycle concerns as maternal, neonatal and child health, said Dr. William Martin II of the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health, one of the report’s authors.

“The role of women in reducing the health risks associated with household air pollution is critical,” Martin wrote from Moscow in response to emailed questions. “They are almost always the end users of the new stove of fuel technology. If it does not meet their needs, it will not be used, end of story.”

[click to continue…]

Bookmark and Share

Peruvian Highlands, Fume-Free – Pilar Nores Bodereau

October 18, 2011 · 0 comments

Science 14 October 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6053 p. 157, DOI: 10.1126/science.1212526

EDITORIAL – Peruvian Highlands, Fume-Free, by Pilar Nores Bodereau

Pilar Nores Bodereau is the founder of Sembrando and a former first lady of Peru.

In the andean highlands of Peru, a typical single-room home will burn approximately 3.6 tons of wood a year, not just for heating but for cooking indoors. Three billion people world-wide cook indoors over open fires with solid fuels. This use has a detrimental effect on human health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly two million people die annually from open-fire cooking, with women and young children the most affected. The hazards related to these practices include acute respiratory infections, insufficient weight at birth, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Despite WHO estimates that cookstove smoke is one of the top five threats to public health in poor developing countries, the effects of exposure to it have received limited funding and research attention. The good news is that since the announcement last year of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves [launched by the United Nations (UN) Foundation], coordinated efforts are successfully under way to support the use of clean cookstoves in the developing world.*

Link to register for full-text – http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6053/157.summary

NIH article – Inefficient developing world stoves contribute to 2 million deaths a year

October 14, 2011 · 0 comments

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Inefficient developing world stoves contribute to 2 million deaths a year

An international effort to replace smoky, inefficient household stoves that people commonly use in lower and middle income countries with clean, affordable, fuel efficient stoves could save nearly 2 million lives each year, according to experts from the National Institutes of Health.

In a commentary in Science, the NIH scientists noted that indoor air pollution from such inefficient stoves affects about 3 billion people—nearly half the world’s population. In addition to respiratory disease caused by smoke, the fuel needed by inefficient stoves leads to—deforestation, and environmental degradation.

“Many people in developed countries don’t realize that smoke from indoor cooking fires is a terrible scourge upon the health of a large number of people,” said Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D, director of the National Institutes of Health and an author of the study. “International efforts to combat this scourge are now beginning. The NIH’s role is to support the research that will determine the most efficient, cost effective means to do so while safe guarding human health.”

The study authors stated that nearly half the world’s population uses biomass (wood, crop residues, charcoal or dung) or coal as fuel for cooking and heating. “The primitive fires typically fill homes with dense smoke, blackening walls and ceilings and sickening those within.”

Other authors of the study were William J. Martin II, M.D., associate director for prevention research and health promotion at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Roger I. Glass, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Fogarty International Center, and John M. Balbus, senior advisor for public health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

[click to continue…]

Bookmark and Share

World Can Have Power, Cleaner Stoves for $48 Billion Annually

October 12, 2011 · 0 comments

World Can Have Power, Cleaner Stoves for $48 Billion Annually, IEA Says

Source: Bloomberg, Oct 10, 2011

The world’s entire population can have electricity and cleaner stoves by 2030 if $48 billion is invested each year, the International Energy Agency said in its first estimate of the cost to end energy poverty.

The sum is about the same as the combined annual capital spend of Europe’s two biggest oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and BP Plc (BP/), and five times the $9.1 billion that was invested in 2009 to boost energy access in developing nations. There are 1.3 billion people, or 20 percent of the world population, living without electricity and 2.7 billion that lack clean cooking facilities, the IEA said.

The obstacles to providing modern energy access to everyone are surmountable and national governments should publish targets and provide more seed capital to incentivize private investors, IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol said in an interview from Paris.

“Providing energy for all is crucial for social and economic development, and beyond that it’s a moral obligation,” he said. An illustration of the inequality is that 791 million people in sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa use about as much energy each year as 19.5 million people in New York State, Birol said, citing IEA data.

Judy Mirangoh burns fuels in her house in the Kenyan village of Wanyororo to make heat and light because she has no electricity. Her mud-walled home is less smoky since she replaced her traditional wood-burning fire with a cookstove earlier this year, helping her wallet and her health.

[click to continue…]

Bookmark and Share

Afghanistan – High levels of 1-hydroxypyrene and hydroxyphenanthrenes in urine

October 12, 2011 · 0 comments

Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology , (5 October 2011) | doi:10.1038/jes.2011.33

High levels of 1-hydroxypyrene and hydroxyphenanthrenes in urine of children and adults from Afghanistan

Hamayon Hemat, Jürgen Wittsiepe, Michael Wilhelm, Johannes Müller and Thomas Göen

Among a health cooperation project, we had the opportunity to study the internal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) exposure of residents from urban and rural areas in Afghanistan. Urine samples from 13 children (age 2.0–9 years) and 42 adults (age 20–65 years) were collected. A total of 25 participants were from Kabul, and 30 participants lived in a rural area. The determination of 1-hydroxypyrene and hydroxyphenanthrenes was carried out by high performance liquid chromatography and fluorescence detection. Median (range) were as follows (n=55): 1-hydroxypyrene 1646 ng/l (71–16,288 ng/l) and sum of 1-, 2- and 9-, 3-, 4-OH-phenanthrenes 3602 ng/l (116–19,670 ng/l).

These results indicate a high PAH exposure, compared with the general population in more developed countries. The levels of 1-hydroxypyrene in urine of women (all non-smokers) from the rural area were higher than those from Kabul (N, median, range): rural 15, 2095, 334–11,357 ng/l; Kabul 11, 748,137–5332 ng/l. All households from the rural area used open fires for cooking and energy.

We conclude that populations in low-developed countries may be at special risk to increased PAH exposure due to inadequate control of air pollution from car emissions and due to burning of biomass fuels for cooking and household energy.

Indoor Air Pollution and Blood Pressure in Adult Women

October 5, 2011 · 0 comments

Environmental Health Perspectives, October 2011.

Indoor Air Pollution and Blood Pressure in Adult Women Living in Rural China

Jill Baumgartner, et al.

Background: Almost half of the world’s population uses coal and biomass fuels for domestic energy. Limited evidence suggests that exposure to air pollutants from indoor biomass combustion may be associated with elevated blood pressure (BP).

Objective: Our aim was to assess the relationship between air pollution exposure from indoor biomass combustion and BP in women in rural China.

Methods: We measured 24-hr personal integrated gravimetric exposure to fine particles < 2.5 µm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) and systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) in the winter and summer among 280 women ≥ 25 years of age living in rural households using biomass fuels in Yunnan, China. We investigated the association between PM2.5 exposure and SBP and DBP using mixed-effects models with random intercepts to account for correlation among repeated measures.

Results: Personal average 24-hr exposure to PM2.5 ranged from 22 to 634 µg/m3 in winter and from 9 to 492 µg/m3 in summer. A 1-log-µg/m3 increase in PM2.5 exposure was associated with 2.2 mm Hg higher SBP [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.8 to 3.7; p = 0.003] and 0.5 mm Hg higher DBP (95% CI, –0.4 to 1.3; p = 0.31) among all women; estimated effects varied by age group. Among women > 50 years of age, a 1-log-µg/m3 increase in PM2.5 exposure was associated with 4.1 mm Hg higher SBP (95% CI, 1.5 to 6.6; p = 0.002) and 1.8 mm Hg higher DBP (95% CI, 0.4 to 3.2; p = 0.01). PM2.5 exposure was positively associated with SBP among younger women, but the association was not statistically significant.

Conclusion: PM2.5 exposure from biomass combustion may be a risk factor for elevated BP and hence for cardiovascular events. Our findings should be corroborated in longitudinal studies.

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →