A UK company called Eight19 has announced a solution called IndiGo, a pay-as-you-go, personal electricity system for the developing world. The system combines solar energy and mobile phone technology and allows users to light their homes and charge mobile phones as a service, paid for using scratchcards.

Eight19 wants to increase access to electricity to 1.6bn people who are not connected to the grid and have to resort to fume-emitting fuels such as kerosene. It said solar lamps and phone chargers are not new but so far more expensive than many potential users can afford. Offering solar power as a service, without high purchase costs, gives them access to clean electricity for less money than they spend on kerosene.

“We are excited to be working with Eight19 on this revolutionary technology. Solar energy offers huge economic, health and social benefits to the world’s poorest people; for lighting and mobile phone charging. Eight19’s technology opens up these benefits to many more people. This is a major breakthrough”, said Steve Andrews, CEO of Solar Aid, a charity supporting product trials in Kenya.

The IndiGo system consists of a low-cost solar panel, a battery unit with inbuilt mobile phone charger and a high efficiency light emitting diode (LED) lamp. Users put credit on their IndiGo device using a scratchcard, which is validated over SMS using a standard mobile phone.

Ongoing customer trials in Kenya will be extended to Zambia, Malawi and the Indian sub-continent over the next 3 months. The commercial roll-out of IndiGo will start early in 2012.

“We are very encouraged by this new way of delivering energy to off-grid applications in emerging markets”, said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Eight19. “Indigo enables a new generation of solar power products that are affordable, providing customers with access, often for the first time, to clean low cost energy that eliminates the health risks and carbon emissions of kerosene.”

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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It’s not surprising that a company liked Greenhouse Holdings, which builds eco-friendly infrastructure, would have a thriving California-based operation. But as John Galt, the company’s executive chairman and founder, told Renewable Energy World magazine, the company is not just focusing on wealthy enclaves to grow its business. Greenhouse Holdings sees opportunity in poor countries, where little energy infrastructure exists, and is entering these markets ahead of the competition. “We’ve found a niche,” he said.

A recent paper by Clean Energy Group shows that nations like Africa and India serve not only as strong niche markets, but also as incubators to drive down technology costs. Once the prices come down, the technologies can expand into the developed world, opening the way for green energy to at last be fully cost competitive against the entrenched energy infrastructure.

Clean Energy Group explains that this is “reverse innovation,” a term coined by Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s CEO and Tuck Business School at Dartmouth in a Harvard Business Review article. It describes the path of not only energy technologies, but other advanced products as well.

“This trend is far removed from purely academic theory. Rather, it is an operating strategy for major global corporations doing business in the developing world, with implications for how climate technology could develop. Put simply, reverse innovation means designing, creating, and manufacturing a product in a developing country. The product may initially be designed to meet developing world demands for lower cost, but global companies now use this ‘bottom of the pyramid’ market strategy to create products that are later exported to the developed world,” said the CEG paper, Moving Climate Innovation into the 21st Century: Emerging Lessons from other Sectors and Options for a New Climate Innovation Initiative.

GE’s cheap ($15,000) PC-based ultrasound machine is cited as an example. The company developed the medical device for use in China’s rural outposts where there was no conventional hospital ultrasound. Now the cheaper alternative has made its way to the developed world.

It may seem counter-intuitive but the conditions are often better for scaling up new technologies in poor countries than in rich nations, says the paper. Here’s why: there is no competition. Clean tech innovators in the third world are not, for example, trying to make inroads against cheap coal-fired electricity. They are simply providing electricity where there is none; they are filling a market need.

This fits in with the way disruptive technologies often emerge, according to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. In the paper, Winning and Losing Bets on Green Technologies, he and co-authors say: “In contrast to wealthy nations where consumption of electricity and gasoline is ubiquitous, developing nations are an ideal place to commercialize green energy technologies. In these countries, there is so much non-consumption that green technologies need only be better than the alternative: nothing.”

In emerging economies, clean energy helps people better accomplish a job they are trying to do. For example, in Africa it’s better to charge your cell phone from a solar panel in your village than be forced to travel hours to the nearest city. In the West, this convenience is readily available through a vast, cheap and easily accessible grid, which is why government intervention is needed to integrate green energy into wealthy countries, the paper says.

The Obama administration is increasing support to US companies that want to export into these emerging niche markets.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many of the industry’s top magazines and newsletters. She is publisher of the Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

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As I described Friday, a representative of Peabody Energy recently said, “We believe that energy poverty is the world’s top priority, putting people first, not climate change.” I’ve already showed in a previous post why statements like this, which try to pit environmental concerns against poverty-reduction goals, are wrong-headed and hypocritical. Right on cue, a newly-released report has made it even clearer that trying to separate climate change from human welfare creates a false dichotomy—the reason being that low-income countries and populations will suffer most from the coming effects of climate change.
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On Friday the Climate Vulnerable Forum of countries at risk from climate change, partnering with the Spain-based nonprofit DARA, released a peer-reviewed study warning that allowing climate change to continue will by 2030 result in almost one million additional deaths per year. The majority of these deaths will occur in poor countries—the very nations Peabody Energy and its ilk claim they want to “help” by burning more fossil fuels.

Because it is too late to prevent a certain amount of global warming from carbon emissions already released into the atmosphere, some of this damage will occur no matter what happens. But by curbing carbon emissions and shifting off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, world economies can minimize the damage and save thousands or millions of lives. The great danger to the planet’s least developed countries is that action to reduce climate change will not be taken swiftly enough. Climate change inaction, not the shift to a low-carbon world economy, represents the real war on the poor planet-wide. By pressing countries to burn coal instead of developing renewables, international energy giants like Peabody Energy are not doing the poverty-stricken any favors.

Yet while the worst effects of climate change, in terms of lives lost, will be felt in the developing world, industrialized nations are not off the hook themselves. Friday’s report predicts developed countries are on-track to suffer $157 billion in economic losses related to climate change by 2030. Interestingly the United States, the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change, is expected to suffer more economic damage than any other country.

Fortunately we have the technology to move quickly beyond fossil fuels. Though the United States and Canada are making slower progress, European countries from Denmark to Italy are quickly developing their renewable resources and becoming global leaders in the clean-tech industry. Meanwhile in the developing world, successful renewable energy projects are proving that low-income countries don’t have to sacrifice their health and environment in exchange for better access to energy. Solutions to climate change are in our grasp, and all that remains is for world economies to seize on them.

As coal and other fossil fuel industries struggle to remain relevant, you can expect to hear more and more of these companies try to paint themselves as rescuers of the world’s poor. This represents nothing more than a misguided but cleverly orchestrated PR campaign; the truth is that helping the poor and safeguarding the climate are goals as inseparable as they are important. With a little innovation and a concentrated push to shift to clean energy, the world can accomplish both.

Article by Nick Englefried, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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The largest city in the Western Hemisphere and third-biggest metropolitan area in the world is going to great lengths to clear its air and reduce its contribution to climate change. A few years ago the office of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard first laid out a citywide “Plan Verde”, intended to gradually convert the massive metropolis into an environmental leader. Many clean air and climate-related initiatives are now well underway, including sophisticated subway and bus systems that continue to expand, a public bike-sharing program, and urban composting initiatives. By the end of next year, the city government hopes to close a major landfill and use methane gas from decaying garbage to produce electricity.

Mexico City’s climate change initiatives have received special attention lately because in the next couple weeks the city will be hosting the Third World Congress of United Cities and Local Governments, followed closely by the World Mayors Summit on Climate Change. Observers predict Mayor Ebrard will try to convince other local government leaders to follow his example and take on a more proactive role fighting climate change. With national policymakers in the United States and some other big economies failing to deliver bold climate solutions, and with no international climate change treaty on the horizon, city efforts to curb carbon emissions are now more important than ever.

The City government of Mexico City says climate change is one of its top five priorities, and has taken impressive strides to combat pollution and carbon emissions. But no one expects clearing the air in this vast metropolis will be easy. For reasons that are not entirely the city’s fault, Mexico City has become known as one of the most polluted places in the America’s. Similar to some parts of California, the geography of the local area is such that smog and other pollutants tend to stay trapped around the city.

To this add the fact that Mexico City’s water aquifers are quickly becoming depleted, and the imperative for dealing with environmental problems becomes clear. While neither smog pollution nor local water shortages are directly related to climate change, Mexico City’s environmental ethic seems to have been easily extended to encompass a concern for the climate as well. In recent years countering climate change has become the overarching theme of Plan Verde programs, and the city says it is devoting one billion US dollars per year to implement a climate action plan.

Many people in the United States are already familiar with climate change-related initiatives in US cities like New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. But probably far fewer realize cities in the developing world are also taking the lead on this issue. At this month’s two gatherings for local government officials, delegates will have the chance to learn from Mexico City’s example and make commitments of their own to develop low-carbon economies. Local leaders should seize this opportunity as a chance to protect their own residents from runaway climate change and other environmental problems.

Article by Nick Engelfried, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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Australian researchers have ranked the world’s nations based on their environmental impact using seven key indicators, including forest loss, habitat conversion, greenhouse gas emissions, and species loss.

The top 10 countries in terms of environmental impact are Brazil, the United States, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia, and Peru.

After correlating the ranking with socio-economic variables, the researchers found that total wealth was the most important factor driving environmental impact.

“The richer a country, the greater its average environmental impact,” said Corey Bradshaw, director of the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute and lead author of the study, which was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Among the worst performers in a relative ranking based on size are Singapore, Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, and Japan. There was no evidence, Bradshaw said, that rich nations — which have greater access to clean energy technologies — have a reduced environmental impact because of increased environmental awareness.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: vihh

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Two separate high-level diplomatic events last week gave more credence to the notion that in the months leading up to the next round of U.N. climate talks in Mexico in December, developing countries are working on building some strategic alliances — strategic alliances structured around the principle that it will be harder to develop without the help of fossil fuels like coal and oil, than it was to develop with them.

If there is ever going to be an international climate treaty that puts limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, developing nations are going to make sure they don’t get the short end of the stick.

Making sure they don’t end up with that deal, the environment ministers of Brazil, South Africa, India and China (BASIC) met in Cape Town over to discuss their approach at upcoming global climate change negotiations. In a joint statement issued by the environment ministers, the BASIC countries said that a legally binding follow-up treaty to the Kyoto protocol should be agreed no later than the U.N. climate summit late 2011 in Cape Town.

The BASIC countries are responsible for about 30 percent of global carbon emissions, but represent a much larger proportion of the world’s population. In some respects, they command more bargaining power than the industrialized countries of the global North.

“Developing countries strongly support international legally binding agreements, as the lack of such agreements hurts developing countries more than developed countries,” the statement said.

The BASIC countries also reiterated the need for rich countries to ramp up their emission reduction targets and called for the UN to be the only legitimized global body for climate change negotiations.

Environmental groups welcomed the statement from BASIC — a statement that seems to represent a big policy shift, particularly for China.

“There is momentum coming out of these countries after what was essentially an almost collapsed negotiation in Copenhagen,” said Themba Linden, a political advisor for Greenpeace Africa.

“China openly calling for a legally binding agreement, this is awesome progress,” Linden said.

The People’s Summit

Across the Atlantic, and also in the Southern Hemisphere, Bolivian President Evo Morales hosted a three-day ‘People’s Summit’ focusing on the world’s poorest people. Representatives of nearly 130 countries, including many of the world’s poorest, gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia to give voice to a group they say was largely ignored at the United Nations COP 15 climate talks in Copenhagen last December.

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights was designed to give louder voice to a coalition of poorer countries and their leaders a louder voice leading up to the next round of climate talks in Mexico in December.

“We’re here because industrialized countries have not honored their promises,” president Morales told a crowd of 20,000 people gathered at the summit.

“Either capitalism dies, or it will be Mother Earth,” Morales said.

Conference attendees drafted new proposals for the next U.N. climate talks in Mexico, but until then, they showed they had little tolerance for the United Nations, almost booing the U.N. representative out of the building.

“We came with all respect to hear the people, you invited us to be here. If you don’t want us to be here we can leave,” said Alicia Barcena , executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Leaders in the developing world are well aware that economic development in a carbon constrained world will not be cheap or easy. But they’re also aware that the economies that sprang to life during the industrial revolution did so almost entirely on the back of coal — the most carbon intensive energy ever used.

Article by Timothy B. Hurst appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: kk+

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In Normandy, France, a company makes a nutritional supplement called Plumpynut that offers the best hope for the world’s starving children.

Invented in 1999 by French pediatric nutritional scientist Andre Briend, who is affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO), and manufactured under the flagship French company Nutriset, which was formed in 1986 to address the nutritional problems of populations at risk, the product is manufactured under license from the company in several African countries where, in the past five years, it has transformed the treatment of malnourished children.

According to Doctors Without Borders’ chief nutritionist, Dr. Milton Tectonidis, the product is remarkable in that it delivers a mega-burst of essential nutrients like protein, calcium, vitamins and minerals from a sterile, single-serving packet that doesn’t require any refrigeration, cooking, or clean water.

The nutrition provided is so complete that, without hospitalization (or in fact any intervention except delivery of the pouches), starving children can be brought back from the brink in 21 days.

Inspired by Nutella, which was invented in the 1940s by Italian firm Ferrero as a nutritional spread that substituted hazelnuts for chocolate made scarce by the war, Plumpynut is made of peanut butter paste, vegetable oil, powdered milk, powdered sugar for energy, and supplemented with vitamins and minerals, the substance is, in the worlds of one Doctors Without Borders worker, “transformational”.

Because it contains a range of vitamins – A, B-complex , C, D, E, and K – and minerals calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, iodine, sodium, and selenium, in 92-gram packets that deliver 500 kilocalories of highly specialized nutrition, Plumpynut works where local food and even family food fails. This is because, past a specific stage of malnutrition, children are unable to digest “regular” food and need intense nutrition.

At about $1 per day, or 12 Euros a month, for a regimen of two packs per day for from two to four weeks, the nutrition is also affordable, even in very poor nations like Niger, where Plumpynut went through field trials during the food crisis in 2005. Equally as important, children – even those weakened by malnutrition – can feed themselves simply by squeezing the envelope. Plumpynut also comes in small tubs, like margarine.

In fact, according to Dr. Tectonidis, if the United States and the European Union were willing to spend part of their food-aid dollar on Plumpynut, more companies would start making it.

And there’s the rub, because Nutriset controls the U.S. patent 6346284 , and aside from its packaging licenses given to businesses in Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), Mozambique, and the Dominican Republic, the product can’t be replicated, or even imitated, even by manufacturers who suggest they could produce the same substance at lower cost.

According to Nutriset officials, the patent is needed to insure that greedy manufacturers don’t flood the market with inferior product that could actually make the malnutrition problem in the third world worse (by, for example, substituting items like melamine, as the Chinese did).

Two U.S. nonprofits disagree, and in January said they would sue to challenge the patent, which Director Mike Mellace of the California-based Mama Cares Foundation describes as “so broad and generic that the patent has already been violated by a whole range of foodstuffs”.

The other nonprofit is Lubbock, Texas-based Breedlove Foods , whose CEO, David Fish, is working with Mama Cares and Dallas-based patent attorney Bob Chiaviello. Chiaviello’s firm, Fulbright & Jaworski, is working pro bono to overturn the patent and provide a landscape in which firms like Mama Cares and Breedlove can act to provide cheaper nutrition supplements, which both nonprofits charge Nutriset with preventing.

In fact, Nutriset, under its patent, now provides about 90 percent of the global supply of therapeutic foods. This, according to Mellace, outlines the monopoly that prevents his product, Re:vive (and similar supplements, also called RUTFs, or Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods) from competing.

To support his claim, Mellace notes that only about two million children worldwide are receiving Plumpynuts, even though fully 150 million suffer from some degree of malnutrition.

For Nutriset, the picture is very different. If the patent is overturned, officials say, Nutriset licensees, or partners, in Africa will not be able to compete in a global marketplace with better funded and better equipped American and European manufacturers. And that, in turn, would defeat the “nutritional autonomy” or food security provided by having the product made where it is most often used.

The problem with U.S. production, says Nutriset, is that funding for humanitarian food and nutritional supplement suppliers requires that almost all the aid money be spent on American-grown surplus crops. This means that third world peanut farmers would get short shrift in a global marketplace, further increasing poverty in those countries at highest risk of childhood malnutrition.

But the argument loses its potency when one considers the fact that the French company has just extended its franchising to a Rhode Island firm called Edesia, which will become the United States’ first RUTF production facility.

Mellace and Fish aren’t the French company’s only opponents. In November of 2009, Norwegian RUTF manufacturer Compact confronted Nutriset for blocking shipment of its product to Kenya, from whence Compact intended to ship to Somalia and the DR Congo. In the same year, the Indian government blocked aid agencies using Plumpynut to treat regional pockets of malnutrition. India’s claim? Plumpynut prevented the use of locally grown food.

The question remains; is Nutriset’s defense of its patent purely altruistic, aimed at providing nutritional sovereignty and preventing shoddy nutritional supplements, or is the consistent attack on companies in the same venue an effort to preserve its market base in a constantly changing and increasingly hungry world?

Article by Jeanne Roberts appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: IRIN Photos

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According to the United Nations, an estimated 40 percent of the global population, or close to 2.6 billion million people do not have access to a toilet of any sort, even a pit latrine.

This has created a public health crisis in developing countries, both in terms of contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation techniques. More than one million children mostly under the age of five die each year from diarrhea resulting from this lack of sanitary conditions. While the technology exists to solve this problem, it is expensive and sometimes hard to install.

But Swedish architect and entrepreneur, Anders Wilhelmson is hoping to tackle the issue with his invention: a safe, affordable, biodegradable plastic bag called the Peepoo that can be used as a single-use toilet.

According to the New York Times, Wilhelmson got the idea for the Peepoo while doing research in Kenya’s urban slums where he observed residents using cheap plastic bags to dispose of their waste and then literally tossing the bags out the window, know as “Flying Toilets.”

Wilhelmson and his team at Stockholm-based Peepoople developed a biodegradable bag made from 45 percent renewable materials (with a goal of 100 percent) with an interior lined with a thin layer of urea crystals. Urea, a non-hazardous chemical, breaks down disease-spreading pathogens such as parasites and bacteria in human excrement so the Peepoo can actually be used as a fertilizer. While in Kenya, Wilhelmson found that open areas that could be available for waste burial surrounded even the most densely packed slums.

Peepoople conducted tests in Kenya and Bangladesh in 2008-2009, and now Wlhelmson hopes to commercialize the product in 2010. He plans on selling each Peepoo for two or three cents, approximately the cost of an ordinary, non-disposable plastic bag.

The World Toilet Organization (WTO), a sanitation advocacy group, estimates the market for inexpensive toilets in the developing world is close to a trillion dollars. The organization has held an annual World Toilet Summit that has resulted in entrepreneurs such as Wilhemson working on low-cost sanitation solutions.

As reported in the Time, Rigel Technology of Singapore demonstrated a $30 toilet at the 2009 WTO meeting that turns solid waste into compost, and Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit, has been promoting a number of low-cost toilets, including a one that produces biogas from human waste that can then be used for cooking.

The WTO has declared November 19 as “World Toilet Day” to increase awareness and generate local action for improved sanitation around the world.

Article by Julie Mitchell appearing courtesy Celsias.

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Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

“If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.”

Sooty, indoor air pollution from open wood or other biomass fires has long been linked to health problems and deaths. More recently, scientists have been surprised to learn that black carbon — not only from biomass fires but from dirty diesel engines and other sources — is a far larger contributor to global warming than previously suspected: The dark particles absorb and retain heat close to the Earth’s surface that might otherwise be reflected.

Some two billion people around the world, Guruswami notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass — dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher — about three-fourths.

“Think about that,” says Guruswami, who directs his university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security. “Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it.”

Public health scientists have been pointing out for years that open fires and primitive stoves for cooking and heating used in much of the developing world pose profound health risks, particularly among women and children. Women typically spend hours cooking multiple meals beside smoky fires and stoves, with infants and small children in close proximity.

The public health implications alone are profound: 1.5 million lives are lost to respiratory, heart and other soot-related harm every year, according to World Health Organization estimates.

As for the climate aspects, atmospheric scientists have more recently reported that ordinary soot — or black carbon — plays a surprisingly large role in global and regional warming. Some scientists now estimate that small, solid particles of black carbon are responsible for about one-fifth of warming globally and, as such, are the second-largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide gas.

In addition to soaking up heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, dark particles — or aerosols — are blown poleward or up mountains, where they settle on snow and ice and absorb warmth. Although dirty diesel engines, power plants and other more advanced technologies produce black carbon, cooking fires appear to be the largest source of soot in developing nations.

More alarming, extra warming driven by black carbon appears to be especially amplified in the high country of Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s highest mountains. There, in a region sometimes called the “Third Pole,” summer melt-water from thousands of glaciers forms the headwaters of major rivers that provide water to more than a billion people in teeming cities and small farms below, in India, China, and smaller nations like Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the plateau has been called “Asia’s water tower,” feeding the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers.

Already, glaciers on the plateau have declined by about 20 percent since the 1960s. Scientists have predicted that with rising Asian populations and more open fires, diesel engines, and burning of forests, the glacial melt will accelerate, eventually diminishing the rivers below.

Beginning in 2007, scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography helped establish just how profound warming boosted by black carbon might be in the Tibetan Plateau. While previous hints had come from computer models, Scripps scientists working in India measured soot levels and dispersion by flying three unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors across the region. Using this data, the Scripps team, headed by climatologist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, concluded that black carbon was probably contributing at least as much to the Tibetan Plateau’s glacial melt as were greenhouse gases. A separate study last month estimated that black carbon was responsible for at least 30 percent of glacial melt in the Himalayas.

Late last year, NASA reported that black carbon rises into the atmosphere, attaches to dust, and moves with warm-season air patterns to the Himalayan foothills. Heat from the sun warms this “brown cloud,” accelerating its typical monsoon season rise up the slope, essentially pumping heat up the mountains, according to William Lau, who heads research in atmospheric sciences at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,” Lau said at a press briefing in December, noting that the heating problem is most dramatic in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau. “Based on the differences, it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in [this] region,” he added. “There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

Enter the cook stove. A November 2009 study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that a decade-long, all-out effort to equip about 90 percent of Indian households that burn biomass with clean-burning cook stoves by 2020 would reduce premature deaths by 17 percent annually, essentially saving 55.5 million years of human life.

But there’s a key reason the world’s poor have long cooked with biomass over sooty fires, often nothing more than a “three-stone fire” with dried dung or brush smoldering under a pot sitting on a triangle of stones: They couldn’t afford anything better.

The University of Colorado’s Guruswami says that to be workable for billions of people who might live on as little as one dollar a day, a better cook stove has to have three main attributes: It has to reduce soot, it has to be long-lived, and it has to be cheap — ideally $10 or less. The good news is that inventors and engineers have come up with various versions of efficient cook stoves, some of them both simple to use and inexpensive.

In the early 1980s, Oregon-based engineer Larry Winiarski developed what he called the Rocket Stove, designed for cleaner combustion and more heat using a fire that burns the tips of a long bunch of small wood sticks: To feed the fire as the tips burn away, a cook need only push the bundle in further. The Rocket stove is designed to take advantage of natural convection to burn its biomass more efficiently, and in fact uses about half as much wood as a primitive three-stone fire or simpler stove.

The Aprovecho Research Center, a nonprofit where Winiarski serves as technical director, estimates that more than 40 stove projects in many nations have since built Rocket stoves, and estimates that more than a quarter-million Rocket stoves are now being used worldwide.

Fort Collins, Colo., home to a major university-based combustion laboratory, is a hotbed of cook-stove advocacy and dissemination.

Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

The group works closely with Colorado State’s world-class Engines and Energy Conversion Lab to develop other combustion-chamber and stove efficiency features. The engineering focus, says Envirofit Vice President of Engineering Nathan Lorenz, has been to “control the geometry of the combustion chambers and heat transfer.” The more heat you transfer, the faster a pot heats up, the less fuel you burn.

About 100,000 Envirofit stoves have already been sold in India, at prices as low as 700 rupees, or about $15. The stoves quickly pay for themselves in fuel savings alone, allowing households to save $50 to $75 annually that would have been spent on wood or other biomass, even while using 60 percent less biomass and eliminating about 80 percent of soot.

Another Fort Collins-based nonprofit, called Trees, Water, and People, focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, where it promotes local construction of Rocket-type stoves. Working with local partners, the group says it has built more than 35,000 stoves.

In India, Scripp’s V. Ramanathan has helped pioneer a newer program that adds a layer of science. Dubbed Project Surya, this nascent effort is conducted in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. Its first community-wide experiment, launched last March in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, will provide cook stoves, along with solar lanterns (to replace sooty kerosene lamps), to every household that wants them.

The unique feature: The project is designed to collect a wealth of data. A small sensor on the roof of the home of the village leader will provide the first accurate measurements of how much carbon is actually reduced in the local setting. Regional sensors and satellites will eventually help scientists learn more about more widespread pollution effects.

The Energy and Resources Institute in India also has launched a “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign designed to replace soot-producing kerosene lamps and dung or wood fires with solar-powered lanterns. Begun in 2008, the campaign has so far supplied more than 6,000 solar lanterns to people in roughly 200 Indian villages.

Elsewhere, two of Europe’s largest industrial corporations, Phillips and Bosch, also have high-efficiency cook stoves in development. At Yale University, mechanical engineer Allesandro Gomez, director of the school’s Center for Combustion Studies, has begun to work on other designs.

But a conundrum remains. Researchers have found that it can be difficult to convince people to switch from traditional cooking methods to more advanced stoves, for a variety of reasons that range from uneasiness with unfamiliar or finicky technology, to upfront costs. Working with Yale development economist Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and a local NGO, a team of researchers at Stanford University has found that many households in Bangladesh simply do not regard the high-efficiency cook stoves as great improvements. The group found that even when offered completely free stoves, more than 30 percent of households refused the offer.

Envirofit’s Lorenz says some of those stoves are simply too cheaply made. That’s why his nonprofit focuses on charging at least minimally for its more durable products, and even paying attention to product aesthetics. “People would rather be treated like customers than victims,” he says.

In India, the promise of improved cook stoves and reduced black carbon have triggered high-level government action recently. In December, New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah announced a new “National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative.” Given that the world’s wealthiest nations are overwhelmingly responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, it seems reasonable to suggest that these countries could launch micro-lending programs to underwrite the widespread adoption of clean stoves.

India and the world have at least one good reason to move quickly to reduce black carbon: Compared to greenhouse gas reductions, slashing black carbon offers a much quicker and cheaper fix. While climate-altering carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for many decades, solid soot generally falls from the sky in days or weeks.

“It’s a faster fix, and when you think about the humongous cost of fixing even one power plant to reduce carbon dioxide, it’s really cheap,” says Guruswami. “This is what economists like to call low-lying fruit. Let’s find a way pick it.”

Article by John Luoma appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360, NASA Visible Earth.

photo: Ed Brambley

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In the slums of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, about 1 million poor people pay up to 30 times more for water of dubious quality brought to them in old tanker trucks than middle-class citizens pay for clean and safe water provided by the local public water utility via standard household connections.

Some may be shocked by these disturbing disparities in the developing world, but a lack of access to safe, affordable and clean water is also an issue in California, particularly in the Central Valley and along the Central Coast. In these communities, more than 90 percent of drinking water is sucked from contaminated groundwater sources. All told, more than 150,000 California residents lack safe water for drinking, bathing and washing dishes; even more have water service disconnected because they cannot afford to pay their bill.

While the arid West – including California – has always suffered from more severe water challenges than the rest of the country, experts claim 36 states will experience local or regional water shortages over the next five years. Spain is also facing an extreme water crisis, with some wondering whether the Sahara Desert will cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa. And droughts seem to have become a permanent way of life in Australia.

Society appears to face a global crisis in water supply as one in six people – more than 1 billion humans – do not have adequate potable water to meet their most basic survival needs. These facts have spurred efforts to enshrine the human right to water at the United Nations and in the national constitutions of countries such as South Africa and Ecuador.

Interestingly enough, the prime opponent of guaranteeing a human right to water on the international stage at the United Nations has been the United States, which, by the way, is also opposed to a human right to housing and food. It is this political dynamic of our federal government opposing human rights to water that makes Assembly Bill 1242 by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, D-Los Altos, so interesting. The bill is moving through the California Legislature and a key vote is scheduled Monday.

International debate rages

“The language included in AB 1242 is typical of that used by organizations and campaigns around the world declaring a legal human right to water,” said Jeff Conant, international research and communications coordinator for Food and Water Watch, one of the sponsors of the legislation. He went on to say that it would be up to state and local agencies to figure out how to “operationalize” this concept.

On the international stage, much of the discussion about a human right to water is wrapped up in the legal mechanics of treaties and policies at the United Nations. Patricia Jones, program manager for the environmental justice program of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, favors the concept of an “International Bill of Human Rights” that would be comprised of direct obligations and treaties that would make the human right to water both explicit and implicit. World Health Organization activists have been working on similar ideas but focused more on trying to stop the spread of endemic diseases, requiring regional governments to commit to the human right to water to receive funding for water projects.

“From a legal point of view, there most definitely is a human right to water, which is part of the right to an adequate standard of living,”

argues Thorsten Keifer, a human rights expert with Bread for the World, a 50-year-old German nonprofit organization. “The question of how such a right to water can finally be recognized is a very good one as there is nothing like an agreed-upon check list for recognition of implied or new human rights in international law.”

From his vantage point, the right to water is not at all at odds with goals of efficiency, reduced water use and effective pricing. “The right to water does not mean that water should per se be for free, but that it should be affordable for all people,” he said.

“That the human right to water means that everyone should have access to water free of charge is a common misconception – propagated by a handful of activists – that has really interfered with discussions on the issue for far too long. Everyone who can pay should pay!”

So how does a corporation fulfill the human right to water? Coca-Cola has developed a “rights-based approach” because water is so fundamental to its business, and has such large impacts on ecosystems and people. This policy applies to existing and new production, and bottling plants.

“In essence, what this approach means is that our use of water should not infringe on the ability of humans to access water or impact the groundwater or the general population. Our presence as an economic entity should not raise the price of water and make water less affordable to the local community,” said Greg Koch, global director, water stewardship, for the Coca-Cola Co.

Harry Ott, a retired Coca-Cola executive and a senior fellow with Future 500, a San Francisco-based organization, added this: “What I’ve learned is that one must meet with the local community on a regular basis, ideally, before you begin building or operating. One not only needs a government license, but a social license.”

He noted that Coca-Cola’s employees benefit from better water management. “If our employees have poor water quality at their homes, then they get sick and cannot work.”

The California context

Californians will likely face escalating water bills to pay for facilities to treat contamination and to upgrade aging infrastructure. Many supporters of AB 1242 are concerned about the cost implications for disenfranchised citizens, particularly low- income Central Valley residents.

Some environmental organizations, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, argue that we do not charge enough for water, and that’s why so much is wasted.

“We need to decouple revenue from sales,” argued Ronnie Cohen, water policy director for NRDC, referencing pricing strategies employed in the electricity sector in California. “The city of Los Angeles has such an adjustment mechanism to account for (water) conservative programs, but most water agencies lose money if people conserve too much. These water agencies need to sell water to collect revenue to run their programs.”

California part of the conversation

AB 1242 does not delve into any of these specifics of water pricing or water management, but it is viewed as the first step in addressing water issues most pressing in the Central Valley akin to safety and cost issues more commonly witnessed in the developing world. California does not have a universal statewide lifeline water rate or allocation – one similar to our lifeline rates for energy and phone service – so when costs become excessive, families cannot pay their bills and risk losing water service entirely.

The issues facing the Central Valley are much more common in the developing world and China, where, oddly enough, multinationals often are better at cleaning up their acts than are local governments.

AB 1242’s general affirmation of the human right to water is intended to address a specific challenge regarding groundwater contamination and access to affordable water in Central California. But it is also part of a much larger conversation.

Declaring a human right to water is one thing. Figuring out how to guarantee access to this elixir of life is a Rubik’s cube. Yet we certainly must begin somewhere, and soon.

Author Peter Asmus is an environmental writer based in Stinson Beach and author of the new book “Introduction to Energy in California,” published by the University of California Press.

Article appearing courtesy of The Sacramento Bee

[photo credit: ONE DROP Foundation]

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