Almost half the world’s households, some three billion, eat food cooked on fires and stoves burning wood, dung, coal, straw, husks and charcoal.

 

Traditional stoves make kitchens death traps for the world’s most vulnerable people. Pollution levels from smoke and gases such as carbon monoxide are typically hundreds of times those that would be tolerated in the streets or a factory. An estimated 1.6 million people die annually as a result, including around a million children under five, mostly victims of childhood pneumonia.

 

Recent emissions studies discover that black carbon, though it only lasts in the atmosphere for a few days, may rival methane as the second most important component of global warming after CO2. Some climate scientists argue that reducing black carbon emissions would be the fastest method of slowing climate change in the short term. But fine particles in the smoke from stoves and cooking fires also shade the Earth, thus causing cooling. So the combined effects of all the constituents of smoke need to be studied further and can be highly variable, depending on when and where they occur.

 

Nonetheless, several studies of the combined emissions from stoves suggest that household stoves typically may emit gases and particles that together have a net warming effect equivalent to between one and three tones of CO2 annually.

The project's goal is therefore to provide MORE EFFICIENT – MORE HEALTHIER AND MORE CLIMATE FRIENDLY – cooking stoves to the Niger Delta region Nigeria.

 

These  cooking stovest burn less fuel and has been given voluntary carbon credits in Ghana, according to ClimateCare.