Carbon Watch

Replacing traditional 3-stone stoves with improved Cookstoves

High impact project improving households’ standard of living drastically by addressing 8 of 19 SDG goals.

Today, over 300 million people are living in forest fringe areas in India alone.

This represents approximately 75 million households in India using inefficient cookstoves for cooking and heating purposes, each of them releasing over 10 tons of toxic gases annually, which converts to over 750 million tCOe emissions from India alone due to inefficient cooking and heating methods.
Inefficient burning of biomass releases a plethora of harmful gases. While GHG slowly warms the planet, affecting lives over hundreds of years, toxic fumes like particulate matter and carbon monoxide are deadly to human health in the shorter term. Indoor air pollution is attributed to over 3.8 million people dying annually worldwide.

Fixing this is crucial!

What are Improved Cookstoves?

Improved cookstoves are cookstoves that burn fuel more efficiently than 3-stone cookstoves through technology or design upgrades. As a result, it speeds up the combustion process, saving fuel and reducing emissions and pollution. Studies show improved cookstoves can reduce harmful smoke emissions by up to 80 - 90% and reduce non-renewable fuelwood consumption by up to 40 - 50%.

By distributing improved cookstoves, we can avoid ~4 tCOe emissions per cookstove annually.

Distributing these cookstoves also help the household reduce healthcare cost, and reduce drudgery allowing them to take part in other economic activities or pursue education improving their socioeconomic standing in the long term.

Our little contribution? We are currently working on a project that is targeting to deliver over 3 million cookstoves to remote villages in India.

Technology

Improved Cookstoves

Life of the cookstove

7 Years

Reduction in CO2e emission annually per cookstove

4 tCO2e

Expected target deployment

3,000,000 units

Expected emission reduction from our programme (10-year Period)

80,000,000 tCO2e

Carbon Avoidance

We expect each cookstove to reduce emissions by nearly 4 tons of COe annually. This converts to nearly 12 million tCOe annual emissions being avoided directly through our project when fully deployed.

Reduced Drudgery

These cookstoves reduce the fuel wood required by up to 50%, reducing the time spent by women and children (who primarily do these activities) outdoors foraging for fuelwood, which converts to 750 million tons of COe emission from India alone due to inefficient cooking and heating methods.

Gender Equality

The project frees up a significant amount of time tied to collecting fuelwood and cooking time. Women tied to these activities will be able to pursue meaningful economic activities with the saved time. 

Health Benefits

Reducing drudgery and indoor toxic emissions will reduce the overall negative health effects involved with these activities. This, in turn, enables the household to take up economical activities, improving their socioeconomic standing. 

Promoting Education

Children in these forest fringe areas spend a significant amount of time collecting and transporting fuel woods. Reducing this will allow them to pursue education. 

Employment Opportunity

The project provides direct and indirect employment opportunities to people through the manufacturing and distribution of cookstoves and monitoring required for the project.