Climate Change

While much of the recent work in the cook stove community has been focused on the potential health benefits of improved stoves, data is emerging supporting possible benefits that improved cook stoves could have for the health of the climate as well. Some of the major greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), are present in the emissions from biomass cooking stoves. Particulate matter emissions from traditional biomass cooking stoves are also significant and have strong and visible effects on the climate. An August 2007 headline in the online BBC News stated “Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity” [BBC, 2007]. These clouds are composed primarily of soot, or black carbon particles.  A similar article in the Scientific American stated “The dominant source for all this black carbon is cooking fires” [Biello, 2007]. A later article in Nature Geoscience [Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008], summarized in the New York Times [Revkin, 2008], showed the contribution of cooking fires on the overall Asian black carbon concentrations, as shown in [Adhikary et al., 007].  

Further, studies are showing that the soot particles, which enhance the solar absorption by snow and ice, are contributing to the ice melt in the Himalayas and the retreat of Arctic sea ice [Flanner et al., 2007]. Reduction of soot emissions can show a more immediate effect on halting climate change than reducing the longer-lived emissions of CO2 only.  Just how much gaseous pollutants and black carbon do cooking stoves emit and are there feasible biomass combustion options that can help to reduce emissions from traditional cooking methods? The emissions from five cooking stoves were measured by a team of researchers from the Aprovecho Research Center, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and at Colorado State University.  The stoves were tested in an effort to examine four common methods of wood combustion: open burning, “rocket” combustion chamber-type  combustion, gasification, and forced draft. The emissions from a common charcoal stove were also investigated.

For more information read this article authored by ARC scientists Nordica MacCarty, Damon Ogle, and Dean Still in Energy for Sustainable Development:

A laboratory comparison of the global warming impact of five major types of biomass cooking stove