Nearly one in three people around the world still cook their meals over open fires or on basic stoves, resulting in significant damage to health, living standards, and gender equality.
Today, 2.3 billion people rely on charcoal, firewood, coal, agricultural waste, and animal dung as fuel to prepare meals, causing them to breathe in harmful smoke in the process.
Air pollution from these rudimentary cooking methods causes 3.7 million deaths, ranking it the third largest cause of premature death globally. Women suffer the worst impacts from the lack of clean cooking.
In Uganda, some communities faced with a shortage of wood are burning oil plastics for cooking as they risk the fumes emitted when plastics burn. But that challenge can be overcome this decade through a relatively modest amount of investment, according to a new IEA report, produced in partnership with the African Development Bank Group.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Dr Maria Neira the WHO Director, Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health said that it is sad that the majority of women around are still cooking like it was in the stone age.
She said because the fuels from cooking from wood, cow dung, and lately plastics are not fully combusted, mothers and their babies inhale fumes that go to the respiratory system.
Dr Neira says the inhaled fumes do a lot of damage to the respiratory system leading to pulmonary diseases like asthma and lung cancer. Neira revealed that the dangerous particles from the fumes are not only confined to the respiratory system but affect every part of the body’s system.
“Because from the bloodstream, those horrible particles that are very damaging to our health can reach every organ in our body. We have every day more evidence that those particles can cause to our health,” said Neira while addressing Journalists virtually. She said WHO statistics indicate that 4.2 million people die every year due to indoor pollution.
“This is totally unacceptable we need to accelerate the transition to clean energy for cooking. We need to ensure that these women and men that are affected are free from that” said Dr. Neira.
Away from pollution, the burden faced by women and girls in collecting firewood is enormous. It takes on average five hours a day in some countries to collect firewood. This prevents many women from pursuing education and employment or from starting a business that could deliver financial independence.
The new report, A Vision for Clean Cooking Access for All, offers a practical guide to bringing the tools and fuels needed for every household worldwide to have access to clean cooking by 2030.
International Energy Agency’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said clean cooking is a topic that rarely hits the headlines or makes it onto the political agenda yet, it’s a cornerstone of global efforts to improve energy access, gender equity, economic development, and human dignity.
This report shows universal clean cooking access could be reached worldwide by 2030 with an annual investment of USD 8 billion, which is just a tiny fraction of what the world spends on energy each year. Tackling this injustice is affordable and achievable.
Basic cooking methods that are widely used by populations that lack access to clean cooking also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The collection of wood and charcoal for cooking results in the loss of areas of forest the size of Ireland each year.
In the last decade, global progress on clean cooking has been slow, with progress restricted to a handful of countries. Since 2010, China, India and Indonesia have all halved the number of their citizens who lack clean cooking access. These efforts relied largely on providing free stoves and subsidized canisters of liquefied petroleum gas.
However, during the same period, Africa’s population without clean cooking access continued to climb. Under today’s policy settings, most African countries are not expected to reach full clean cooking access even in the 2050s.
“The lack of access to clean cooking negatively impacts public health, perpetuates deforestation, and increases greenhouse gas emissions. Universal access to modern energy by 2030 is imperative and requires game-changing approaches,” said President Akinwumi Adesina of the African Development Bank Group.
To achieve the universal access target laid out in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7, nearly 300 million people need to gain access to clean cooking means each year between now and 2030. People in sub-Saharan Africa represent half of this amount, highlighting where international efforts need to focus.
The benefits in terms of gender equality, health, and time-savings from reaching universal access to clean cooking would be immense. The report finds, for example, that premature deaths from poor indoor air quality would drop by 2.5 million annually.
The average household would save at least 1.5 hours of time a day, freeing up time for other pursuits such as education or work, especially for women.
The total time savings globally would be equal to the annual working hours of a labour force the size of Japan’s. And the reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions would reach 1.5 billion tonnes a year, equivalent to the current emissions from all ships and planes combined.
Achieving universal access to clean cooking would require an investment of USD 8 billion annually in stoves and infrastructure between now and 2030. This is less than 1 per cent of what governments spent in 2022 globally on measures to keep energy affordable for their citizens.
Public and private finance has a key role to play in advancing clean cooking, especially in regions without the fiscal space to drive the required investment through public funds. Concessional and climate financing will be needed to support projects in the poorest regions, notably in sub-Saharan Africa. Concessional finance would need to make up around half of the annual investment.