SELA MUMULI

Background

A third of the global population cooks with solid fuels like animal dung, charcoal, and firewood, exposing women daily to hazardous fumes. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 4.1 million premature deaths per year due to respiratory conditions caused by indoor cooking.

In Central America alone, almost 20 million people cook with firewood daily, a leading factor in exposing women and their families to household air pollution (HAP). Since 1998, Trees, Water & People has been working with local partners and community members in Guatemala and Honduras to design clean cookstoves that reduce HAP, deforestation, and fuel expenditures. We design, produce, and distribute our stoves in-country, creating jobs for rural tradespeople and employment for local small manufacturers.

We named our cookstove the Justa stove after the woman who helped design it.

Each Justa cookstove installed decreases a family's need for firewood by 50-70% compared to standard open-fire cooking and reduces carbon emissions by at least 3 metric tons annually. Our clean cookstove program is unique because we build all our stoves in-country, using locally sourced materials and locally appropriate design features that result in high levels of adoption.

Environmental Impacts of Cooking with Firewood

• Burning wood fuels accounts for 1.9 - 2.3% of global emissions.

• More than half of black carbon emissions globally stem from incomplete combustion of household fuel, leading to unhealthy levels of exposure.

• The deposition of black carbon in the Arctic absorbs solar radiation in the atmosphere, causing glacial ice to melt more rapidly (Young et al., 2022).

• Two-thirds of fuelwood harvested in Central America never grows back, causing lasting impacts on forest health and global climate.

Benefits of the Justa Stove

• The Justa stove reduces kitchen black carbon concentrations by 76% compared to conventional cooking methods.

• Through local partnerships, TWP trains local tradespeople, ⅓ of them women, to manufacture and install the stove, leading to women’s economic empowerment.

• Reducing the time required for wood collection increases women’s productivity levels and reduces cases of gender-based violence.

• Women and children are exposed to significantly lower HAP concentrations when cooking, reducing self-reported vision and respiratory health symptoms.

• Reducing firewood consumption directly impacts forest health, protecting biodiversity, water sources, and soil integrity.

Represents the reduction, removal, or avoidance of GHG emissions from a specific project that is used to compensate for GHG emissions occurring elsewhere. One offset credit represents 1 metric tonne of CO2 equivalent.

GHGs are the seven gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) (Russell, n.d.).

Any process that removes GHG emissions from the atmosphere and stores them.

The release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (Levin et al., n.d.).

Offsets are most widely used by companies that have set emissions reduction targets, and they have become an increasingly popular way to address indirect emissions; those resulting from actions over which the entity has no direct control (i.e. supplier emissions or product usage by consumers).

An offset credit begins as an emission reduction quantified against a baseline scenario (a.k.a. “business as usual”). The offset is generated when a modified activity produces fewer emissions than the baseline scenario.

Carbon offset projects have benefits far beyond their greenhouse gas reductions; referred to as co-benefits. Benefits from projects on forested lands include improved water quality and biodiversity, which can help to finance everything from the conservation of land to more sustainable agricultural practices to the distribution of cleaner cookstoves in developing countries.

No. The underlying principle behind quality offset projects is called additionality—if a change in practice or a carbon reduction would have happened regardless, due to regulation or in the course of business as usual, no offset is created. In this way, carbon markets ensure they are incentivizing, rather than simply rewarding, practices that reduce carbon

The universal unit of measurement indicates each greenhouse gas’s global warming potential (GWP), expressed in terms of the GWP of one unit of carbon dioxide. It is used to evaluate different greenhouse gases against a common basis.

The uptake and storage of CO2 which can be sequestered by plants or in underground or deep-sea reservoirs.

The release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

A climate-forcing agent formed through the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuel, and biomass.

A factor describing the radiative forcing impact (degree of harm to the atmosphere) of one unit of a given GHG relative to one unit of CO2.

The benefits, in addition to avoided climate change costs ranging from improved air quality, improved human health, broader economic opportunities, etc.