Modern gas and electric cook stoves that we use every day in the U.S. weren't popular until the 1900s. Before that, people cooked with kerosene, coal, and biomass (wood, crop waste, etc). Across the globe, 2.6 billion people still do, resulting in nearly 1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually. While poor people who can’t afford modern cookstoves aren’t to blame for climate change, getting a clean cookstove for them is not only good for the planet, it’s life-changing.
According to the World Health Organization, each year close to 4 million people die prematurely from illness attributable to household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves.
The Benefits of Improved Cook Stoves
Not only do these stoves help prevent premature death, especially among women in children, they:
• Reduces time poverty. Collecting firewood takes time, which often falls to women and children and can take away from time in school. Improved cookstoves can reduce fuel needs by 40-60%.
• Reduces methane and black carbon (soot). These emissions can be dramatically reduced with improved cookstoves, which more efficiently and completely burn fuels.
• Reduces severe burns. A large fraction of the severe burns and injuries in low- and middle- income nations are linked to unimproved cookstoves. Improved stoves can protect families from life-altering burns.
To unlock these benefits, Untonne partners with stove companies to install and monitor clean cook stoves that make a dramatic quality of life improvement. And your Untonne membership helps make that possible, by subsidizing the cost of a new stove that costs more than most people living in poverty can afford.
In addition to the health benefits of these stoves, our partners verify the emissions reductions created by each stove installation so that you can have confidence that these stoves are reducing emissions in an amount equal to your subscription.
All of Untonne’s verified emissions reductions are 3rd party certified through a carbon registry such as the Verified Carbon Standard, or VCS. This means each project supported by Untonne members has gone through a registration and verification process that is overseen by an organization other than Untonne or its partners. So when you subscribe to any of our plans, the impact is real.
You can make a huge difference by helping to bring clean, affordable stoves to the billions of people who are impacted by not having access to this simple appliance that we all take for granted as being clean.
Image sources:
• Banner from the StoveTeam International
• Gas burner from Suludan Diliyaer