Results
The health, nutrition, and financial benefits reported by the families supported in our projects are very convincing, but this is not surprising. Solar cookers and retained heat cookers save fuel that cost money or time and effort to collect. The benefits that come from that savings are usually dramatic. What is more difficult to monitor and calibrate are the emission savings and the environmental impacts of reduced burning.
Since the Kyoto Accord was first signed in 1997 a series of bi-annual meetings called the Conference of the Parties (COP) has hammered out the regulations for the formal carbon market. While this system has a lot of critics, it has represented a somewhat valiant attempt to change the way the world views air pollution. The system measures it and puts a price on it. It then attempts to apply principles of social justice, by insisting that polluters pay, whether they are large industrial emitters or individual consumers. The twist to all of this is that poor disadvantaged segments of our world population who are forced to burn biomass can benefit both themselves and the global environment by switching to the renewable energy of the sun or using less polluting equipment to cook their meals.
The Kyoto Twist Solar Cooking Society is playing an important role in the application of the Kyoto principles to domestic and institutional cooking regimes. We are not currently working in the formal UN backed CDM market, nor in the slightly less rigorous voluntary carbon market, but we are seriously trying to incorporate all of their guidelines within the context of individual community settings. Solar cooking has been accomplished in the formal market, but it is questionable whether that approach is the fastest and most efficient way to meet the current demand. It is expensive (though cost effective in some situations) and administratively intense.
Our recent project in Mali has the best data we have so far been able to attain. We were attracted to this community partly because of the advantages their situation presented in terms of fuel use monitoring and emission calculations. The 30 women in this project all purchase charcoal at a consistent price in consistent quantities, so by simply tracking the money they saved on buying their charcoal we could extrapolate the amount (the weight) of the fuel saved and then using the standard emission factors for this fuel, the amount of greenhouse gas avoided. It was relatively simple and satisfactory enough for our purposes, i.e. to demonstrate to our contributors the real emission savings from our projects. It does not meet the higher standards of CDM and voluntary markets, which require analysis of the renewability of the biomass used, third party verification, and registration of every tonne of emission saved in a certified registry. What we have are spreadsheets from the reporting done by the participants at monthly meetings over a one-year period. They show an average reduction of about 30% of their conventional fuel or a savings of approximately 1.5 tonnes of carbon emissions per household per year.
In our project in Bolivia with CEDESOL in 2007 (see www.cedesol.org), the calculation of fuel savings and emission reduction was more difficult, because the participants often used a mixture of collected firewood and small containers of propane to cook their meals and heat their water. They reported high usage rates for their new solar cookers and the CEDESOL monitors did an admirable job of collecting the best data they could, but without accurate daily record keeping of fuel use in each household the rigid criteria of the formal market could not be met.
Does that mean we steer away from communities that can’t supply data needed to verify emission reductions? At this time the Kyoto Twist is more concerned with simply getting this valuable technology to the people in the world who can most benefit from it. We will continue to monitor fuel savings the best we can in each situation and perhaps someday move into the formal recording of emissions. If you would like to see the data we have collected from our projects please contact us and we would be happy to show you what has been collected and analyzed so far.
Save a tonne, Save a life.
