Climate Change and Solar Cooking
There has been great progress in the field of solar cooking in the past twenty years. The progress has been more social than technological. The community of solar cooker users and promoters has become evermore connected because of the internet and other communication technologies, but more because of the urgency around the economic and environmental demands of a fast changing world.
Half of the world’s population still cooks with biomass and this is putting more and more pressure on fragile ecosystems and economies that must import fossil fuel to run their energy grids or fuel cooking appliances. The World Energy Assessment estimates that between five and seven percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the world today come from the burning of biomass and approximately eighty percent of that is for cooking. Most of that cooking is done in sun-rich countries, where this particular use of wood, charcoal and other forms of biomass make up as much as eighty percent of the total energy requirement of that society.
The demand for alternatives is huge. Solar cooking and other renewable sources of energy can only meet a small percentage of that need at the present time, for many reasons. Solar cooking won’t meet the needs of most of the families and institutions that desperately need an alternative cooking fuel for their own viability, let alone their environment’s. But we now have a much better understanding of which groups and settings can benefit and that is a large set of circumstances. Just as wind power will not be practical in some areas of the world, but has outstripped photovoltaic applications by a large margin in some places (i.e. Europe), solar cooking is the best alternative for other places. The fight to save environments and threatened societies requires a vast array of solutions and solar cooking is one of them.
The children in the photo below are used to seeing their meals cooked with charcoal purchased in one kilogram bags such as the women are selling in the second picture. Now, because of a cooperative effort by a local grassroots organization, the Association of Women Engineers of Mali and a Dutch NGO, the KoZon Foundation that has funded their solar outreach for the past ten years and funding from the Kyoto Twist Solar Cooking Society in Canada, these children’s experience of nutritious meals cooked with the free energy of the sun can never be taken from them. That is a form of sustainable development with immediate benefits to families like theirs.
The best place to view the vast field of solar cooking work that is being done in the world today is www.solarcooking.org. The study of its place in slowing climate change is an even more rigorous investigation, but it can start with some of the links on our resources page. And if you have specific questions please contact us and we will try to be of assistance. If you would like to support the work you have seen on this website you can simply click on DONATION INFORMATION and you can be sure your contribution will…
Save a tonne, Save a life.
