Experts push for cleaner stoves in poor countries to cut pollution, reduce deaths - indoor air cleaner

New delhi-Every night, hundreds of millions of Indian women wander over a simple stove to make dinner for their families.
They feed the flame with contaminated fuels such as kerosene or cow feces, breathing pungent smoke that floats from the fire.
Smoke contains high concentrations of tiny particles known as black carbon, cancer and other diseases leading to premature death, and cause or aggravate environmental problems such as climate change, melting glaciers, and declining crop production.
When you add up all the small stoves, the result is almost disastrous.
However, black carbon is largely unregulated and its costs cannot be measured, creating obstacles to the use of public and donated funds for cleaning cookers.
This situation may now begin to change.
The team of economists, scientists and health experts working with the golden label Foundation has developed a unified approach to calculate how much black carbon has been released from stoves using different technologies or fuels.
They say this is the first and necessary step to get tens of billions of dollars, and it will cost tens of billions of dollars to provide a cleaner cooker for about two people worldwide.
There are still 8 billion people using handmade firewood, kerosene or dried meat cakes. Full of cow dung
"What attracts media attention is the issue of cute animals, crying babies, and large PR groups.
"Indoor air pollution is not one of them," said Bjorn Lomborg, author and economist . " He created the Copenhagen Consensus Center, an economic think tank dedicated to climate issues.
But when you say these numbers, "you will find that there are indeed many benefits to some boring things.
"While the focus of the work is to calculate black carbon from the stove, the same approach can also be applied to other sources of soot, including vehicle or crop burning.
The project director can then use these calculations for court funding as they will be able to show how the project can avoid more pollution to the environment and save lives.
"These tools just didn't help with policy development, although we 've known about the dangers for a long time," said Owen Hewlett, chief technology officer of the Golden label Foundation, who released new standards and calculations last week.
The indoor air contaminated with black carbon is a ruthless killer, causing some pollution.
3 million people die every year around the world, more than HIV, malaria and TB combined.
Most deaths occur in poor countries that cannot afford cleaner stoves.
Black carbon is formed by incomplete combustion and is the main component in tiny particles known as PM2.
This is one of the most common measures of air pollution.
But it has other potential environmental implications.
Studies have shown that it can lead to nearly 20% of global warming;
It darkens the ice in the Arctic and above.
Let the glacier absorb more sunlight and melt faster;
It disturbs the weather by interacting with the cloud in a complex way;
It blocks sunlight and affects crop production. A 3-kilometer-thick (2-mile-thick)
According to research led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, the black carbon pollution layer in parts of Asia is preventing up to 15% of the sun from reaching the Earth, a phenomenon known as "global darkening ", A climate scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
He and other scientists found that regional pollution led to a 36% drop in wheat production in India in 2010.
Experts say reducing the continued emissions of black carbon brings direct climate benefits because it has a shorter life span in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, which could last for centuries.
"Funding stoves with less pollution is one of the few win-win projects
"Win the choice for the planet," Ramanathan, who is also the director of the stove charity, said in a statement. The U. N. -
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, created by Hillary Roham Clinton, helped cookstoves charities find some money through grants and carbon credits --the so-
Known as the "currency" of the carbon dioxide market, it is used for projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A total of 227 projects in the alliance provided more than 5 million new stoves.
But that's 95 million away from its 2020 target, a fraction of global demand.
A recent study by 82 economists on the Lomborg Copenhagen consensus estimated that it would cost $137 billion to give everyone the cleanest burning gasfueled stoves.
The study shows that every dollar in the big investment will bring benefits of $2, such as lower medical costs, cheaper fuel and longer life span.
But given that an expenditure is almost equal to the overall global development budget, this may not be the best way to spend limited resources.
Instead, the study suggests spending $5 billion to provide more efficient stoves for half of those in need, which still burn solid fuel rather than gas.
This will first eliminate the dirtiest stove, thus saving the lives of half a million people.
In general, this method can bring about $10 for every dollar spent.
"You grab low-
"Hang up the fruit first so you have a lot of improvement and still have the money to fix the other issues," Lomborg said . ".
"If we can simply point out small goals and show the best value for money, they are more likely to get the money.
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