But the money pledged still falls short of the $4 billion a year needed for the rest of this decade to wean poor African households off traditional dirty fuels including charcoal, kerosene and firewood, while climate campaigners criticised efforts to switch them to fossil gas.

Countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and India have made progress in recent years, in line with a global goal to provide clean cooking for all by 2030. Yet four in five Africans still use highly polluting cooking methods – around half of the 2.3 billion people who lack clean options worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told the summit his organisation’s aim of making 2024 “a turning point” for clean cooking was being realised.

“It’s now or never,” he said, adding that the IEA will track the commitments made in Paris and share the results with the international community in a year’s time. “We will follow it as if it is our own money,” he emphasised.

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Separately, the African Development Bank (AfDB) confirmed an earlier pledge, first made at the COP28 climate summit last year, to mobilise around $2 billion for clean cooking over the next 10 years, earmarking 20 percent of its energy finance for that purpose.

Speaking in Paris, AfDB president, Akinwumi A. Adesina, said his own eyesight had been damaged by smoke from cooking fires during his childhood in Nigeria, while a friend and members of her family had died in an accident after she was sold petrol instead of kerosene as cooking fuel.

“Why do we let things like that happen?” Adesina asked, adding that enabling clean cooking is a matter of “human dignity, fairness and justice for women”. “It is about life itself,” he said.

Experts have long pointed to the health damage to women and children from carbon monoxide and black soot emitted by cooking over open fires or with basic stoves. Dirty cooking contributes to 3.7 million premature deaths annually, according to the IEA, with women and children most at risk from respiratory and cardiovascular ailments linked to indoor air pollution.

Ahead of the Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa this week in Paris, some climate and gender activists pointed to the small number of African women represented at the gathering – who they said accounted for less than a fifth of registered participants.

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Janet Milongo, coordinator of renewable energy for Climate Action Network International, said the event was biased “towards the continuation of the colonial, patriarchal representation of the continent”.

Speeches were made largely by male leaders of governments and companies, with the notable exception of Tanzania’s president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, and Damilola Ogunbiyi, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Sustainable Energy for All.

Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (left) with the presidents of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and  Togo, the prime minister of Norway; H.E. Maroš Šefčovič, Executive Vice President of the European Green Deal and Akinwumi A. Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group at the Clean Cooking Summit for Africa in Paris, May 14, 2024 (Photo: International Energy Agency)

Clean cooking ‘opportunity’ in NDCs

Ogunbiyi, who is Nigerian and has worked on clean energy policy for the government, said her country had made a big effort on solar electrification but had forgotten about clean cooking.

“We can’t make that mistake again,” she said, calling for clean cooking to be a key part of African governments’ investment plans for their energy transition.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell urged more governments to seize the opportunity to include measures to boost clean cooking in the next updates to their national climate action plans (NDCs) due by early next year.

As of December last year, only 60 NDCs included one or more measures that explicitly target clean cooking, such as Nepal’s goal to ensure that by 2030 half of households use electric stoves as their main mode of cooking and Rwanda promising to disseminate modern efficient cookstoves to 80% of its rural population and 50% of people in cities by that date.

Stiell noted that planet-heating emissions from dirty cooking methods are “significant”, amounting to about 2% of the global total – the equivalent of emissions from the aviation and shipping sectors combined.

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He said the world has the technology to shift people onto modern, cleaner sources of energy and cut emissions in the process, calling it “low-hanging fruit”.

Dymphna van der Lans, CEO of the Clean Cooking Alliance, a global partnership of organisations working on the issue, said it was important to raise awareness not just about the scale of the problem – but to ensure people understand it is an issue that can be solved.

“The technologies exist – they are out there, there are fantastic companies providing these fuels and solutions and services to these customers that actually can be deployed immediately… and reach the populations in Africa,” she told Climate Home after the summit.

LPG conundrum

On stage in Paris, companies ranging from fossil fuel giants such as Total and Shell to smaller manufacturers of cookstoves said they would expand their efforts to reach new customers with more efficient stoves running on modern energy, including liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), bioethanol and electricity.

While there is widespread consensus over ending the use of firewood and charcoal – which contribute to deforestation – there is less agreement over which fuels should replace them.

Efforts to build new distribution networks for LPG – a form of fossil fuel gas – are particularly controversial. At the summit on Tuesday, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said his company wants to increase its 40 million African LPG customers to 100 million and will invest more to boost its LPG production capacity in East Africa.

Pouyanné said there is a need to make LPG cooking affordable – noting that the $30 upfront investment required for a stove and gas canister is too high for most people – which could be done through “pay as you cook” loans.

Some international development agencies that work on the ground to help poor households access clean cooking – including Practical Action – support the use of LPG as a “transitional step” towards clean cooking where options like electricity or ethanol are not available.

“Our primary objective is to ensure people, especially women and children, have access to the best possible solutions which don’t compromise their health and that in the long term aren’t contributing to the worsening climate crisis,” said Practical Action CEO Sarah Roberts.

In the IEA’s “least-cost, realistic scenario” to reach universal clean cooking this decade, LPG remains the primary solution, representing nearly half of households gaining access, while electric cooking is the main option for just one in eight homes.

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The IEA’s analysis shows that this strategy, centred on LPG, would drive up emissions by 0.1 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2030. But that would be more than offset by reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from switching away from firewood, charcoal and inefficient stoves, resulting in a net reduction of 1.5Gt of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

Net greenhouse gas emissions annual savings from clean cooking access in the IEA Access for All scenario by 2030 (in Mt CO2-eq) (Source: IEA)

Red = Combustion; Orange = Avoided combustion; Yellow = Unsustainable harvesting; Green = Net savings          

At the summit, Togo’s president Faure Gnassingbé described LPG as “really the way forward” for clean cooking, and said more production capacity was needed in Africa. He added that ESG investors – which normally apply green and ethical standards – should adjust their environmental criteria so they can back LPG cooking projects despite it being a fossil fuel.

“We should be clear-headed and not open up to sterile debates on this issue,” Gnassingbé told the summit.

Some climate justice activists disagreed, criticising high-level backing for fossil gas as a clean cooking solution.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based energy and climate think-tank, said on social media platform X that the need for clean cooking alternatives “is used by many African politicians as an excuse for building gas infrastructure” which is intended to develop an export industry and never reaches poorer households.

Here’s my response to yesterday’s summit on Clean Cooking in Africa & the declaration issued by #IEA.

“This declaration is a lazy & misguided statement which seems to rely on the private sector to use gas as a solution to this problem.

However, there’s no evidence that will…

— Mohamed Adow (@mohadow) May 15, 2024

He said the money raised at the summit should be channelled instead into high-efficiency, low-cost electric cookers for African women, which could be powered by renewable energy.

Carbon finance principles

Another controversial way of promoting clean cooking, backed by the IEA-hosted summit, is by developing and selling carbon credits for the emissions savings from new technologies and fuels.

The IEA said that around 15% of the total amount pledged in Paris would come via carbon finance, with the proceeds from selling offsets helping subsidise customers’ access to clean cooking.

But Climate Home found in an investigation last year that the methodologies used to calculate emissions reductions from more efficient cookstoves in India had overstated their greenhouse gas savings.

To counter such problems, the Clean Cooking Alliance announced a new set of “Principles for Responsible Carbon Finance in Clean Cooking” in Paris, backed by 100 organisations working in the space.

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The voluntary principles, which aim to build confidence in carbon markets for clean cooking, say project claims should be evidence-based, case-specific and substantiated, and their benefits should be transparent. The alliance is also working with the UN climate secretariat on a new methodology for clean cooking carbon credits which it hopes will be ready this year.

Van der Lans said the goal was to strengthen the quality and integrity of clean-cooking carbon credits in line with the latest science, to achieve a higher, fairer price that fully reflects the work being done to protect forests by moving away from charcoal and firewood.

“Everybody within the clean cooking ecosystem is signing up to these principles,” she noted – from banks to carbon credit verification agencies and companies selling the technology.

“That is a good signal that we’re doing the right things and we’re moving this market in the right direction,” she added.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Joe Lo)

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A start-up in the US is developing a football that generates and stores electricity when kicked and can be used to charge lamps and batteries.

The Soccket Ball contains an “inductive coil mechanism” that converts kinetic energy when the ball is kicked to electricity.

The project already has the backing of Spain and Barcelona forward David Villa and the Clinton Global Initiative but now needs more investment.

The Soccket ball can power a lamp for three hours after 30 minutes of playing time (Source: Socket)

The group behind the ball have launched a Kickstarter crowd sourcing campaign to raise $75,000 for the next stage of its development.

At the time of writing, a $99 pledge gets you your very own Soccket and lamp, which you can divert to a developing country if you choose.

Playing with the ball for 30 minutes can power a lamp for three hours. The new investment will be used to improve the efficiency of the mechanism to increase its benefit.

Between 1.2 and 1.5 billion people live without access to electricity. Sparsely populated areas are too expensive for some developing countries to connect leaving so called off grid solutions, typically small solar panels, as the only option.

Mobiles have become a valuable tool in developing countries with mobile based micro finance and agricultural SMS alerts just some of the advantages they can bring to the rural poor.

Many living off the main electricity grid will pay to charge their mobile phone at central locations.

The Soccket’s lamp could also give a boost to education by allowing children to study at home after dark.

Replacing kerosene lamps and candles, with electric lighting also has health benefits from the removal of their fumes.

Ban Ki-moon’s Sustainable Energy for All project has targeted a doubling in renewable energy globally and as the name suggests, universal access to energy by 2030.

Video: Soccket’s Kickstarter pledge

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Whether a success or failure, Rio+20 has firmly put sustainable development back on the agenda of governments across the world.

As the UK delegation headed out to Rio last week – led by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman – they aimed at focusing on several key areas; making the case for the green economy, pushing the concept of GDP+ to measure growth alongside the well-being of society and pushing for the Sustainable Development Goals.

The final document which came out of the conference – while criticised by many for being light on action – did recognise all three of these principles and puts the world at the beginning of a pathway towards these aims.

DfID say access to modern energy will be vital in eradicating poverty (© UN Photo/Staton Winter)

Now the real work begins, as governments, civil society and the private sector put these words into actions. The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the UK government will play a key role in this transition, with Prime Minister David Cameron co-chairing the high-level panel for a post-Millennium Development Goal framework.

RTCC spoke to Melinda Bohannon, Head of the Climate and Environment Strategy Unit at DFID about how they define sustainable development, what the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should look like and how climate change is impacting the development agenda.

RTCC: This year is the year of Sustainable Energy for All. How vital is ensuring energy access to alleviating poverty?

MB: Dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable in the long term – either economically or environmentally – so it is vital we address energy access in a way that reduces dependencies on fossil fuels and contributes to energy security objectives and builds local resilience.

Access to modern energy technology, such as electricity and efficient cooking facilities, plays a crucial role in fighting poverty.

Today, using smoky stoves to cook is estimated to cause as many as 1.5 million premature deaths a year. Helping the poorest access modern and efficient energy services can help some of the most vulnerable people in the world, especially girls and women, and improve their health, education, and economic options.

That’s why the Coalition Government works hard to support and build local markets and innovation in the private sector to help millions of the poorest people as part of our commitment to fight poverty through our investment into sustainable energy.

World leaders at Rio have set the world on a pathway towards sustainable development (Source: Flickr/UN_Photo_Conference)

RTCC: Sustainable Development is a word which is being discussed and debated around the world now, with many disagreements over what it actually means, what does this term represent for DFID?

MB: DFID’s goal is the eradication of poverty and from this goal springs our understanding of sustainable development.

We aim to balance different, and often competing, development needs against an awareness of the wider environmental, social and economic situation to ensure that we help the poorest without disadvantaging other groups or damaging the natural environment on which the growth is based.

We want to make sure all our work is socially, environmentally and economically sustainable so we make a real and lasting difference. We want to take wide-angled view of development and not be driven by one particular need without fully considering the wider or future impacts.

The Government is promoting the need to value natural resources correctly to help when making decisions that could have a big impact on the environment, such as setting the right business incentives, involving the private sector, and recognising the importance of open access to information.

RTCC: One of the major talking points at the Rio+20 conference was the idea of a new set of SDGs, and the outcome sets out the pathway to agreeing these goals in the future. How do we ensure these goals address the three pillars of sustainable development?

MB: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have played a critical role in shaping the international development agenda and galvanising action over the last decade. The UK Government is committed to reaching the MDG target by 2015 and has already announced efforts to step-up contributions to core development areas such as health and education.

It is clear that thinking behind the idea of SDGs draws on the experience of the MDGs. The UK thinks that SDGs could be a way to draw more attention to those development issues requiring us to bring together all three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental.

That’s why we’re pushing for a short, focused set of SDGs on food, energy and water, and for those SDGs to be developed as part of the broader process to elaborate a post-2015 international development agenda.

RTCC: Could we (and should we) have a set of all-encompassing goals? What lessons can we learn from the MDG process in setting out these new goals?

MB: The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has announced a High Level Panel to consider exactly how to build on the successes of the MDGs and to secure a framework for development going forward.

The UK will play a critical role with the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, one of the co-chairs alongside the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia. Certainly we can see that part of the success of the MDGs is their relative simplicity.

This is something that we will want to hold on to in thinking about how best to bring in not only the critical issues of sustainable development being discussed at Rio but also other important issues such as promoting growth and tackling corruption.

Climate change threatens many vulnerable areas around the world (© DfID)

RTCC: With many of those living in the poorest place increasingly impacted by climate change, how have development priorities changed over the last 20 years because of this?

MB: Climate change is one of the most urgent environmental challenges facing the world today. The UK’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review predicted that 375 million people will be affected by climate related disasters by 2015 every year and the number is expected to increase over time. As droughts, floods and famines set to increase in frequency and intensity and plunge the poorest deeper into poverty, we have to act now to minimise the impact of climate change on DFID’s work.

We have therefore prioritised those sectors most vulnerable to climate impacts and where adaptation support has yet to reach. We have also prioritised those countries and regions that are most vulnerable, but have the capacity to demonstrate the greatest results.  We will work with the private sector to design and deliver programmes to demonstrate what works.

RTCC: In a period of increasing difficulties worldwide, how important has it become to find innovative way of raising funds for climate adaptation and development and ensure the funds go to the right places and the right people?

MB: We need to provide a truly comprehensive and integrated response to the challenges of development and climate change, and finding innovative ways to do this is both essential and urgent. There is huge potential for innovative financing mechanisms to grow and help deliver the money needed to help poor countries to adapt to change.

The UK’s International Climate Fund brings in additional funding from the private sector and looks at less traditional means of channelling funds to those most in need.

We also support initiatives, such as the Clean Development Mechanism and the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, which have raised up to US $5.5 billion for the health sector and $31 billion for the environmental sector since 2002.

Most importantly, the UK is committed to making sure the aid we direct to the poorest people to grow and adapt to climate change actually reaches them.

The UK Government has a zero tolerance approach to corruption and we do not tolerate corruption or misuse of taxpayers’ funds in any form. All allegations of fraud are taken very seriously, and we have robust systems to safeguard aid money and make our systems even stronger.

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Women in the developing world spend a disproportionate time cooking and washing (© UN Photo/Ray Witlin)

By empowering women, the world would see triple benefits for sustainable development – social, economic and environmental – according to an EU Summit.

The Sustainable Energy For All Summit, hosted by the European Commission, is aimed at addressing the barriers to universal access to energy ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June.

With one of the key focuses of the afternoon turning on gender equality, Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director UN Women said that focusing on women’s empowerment was “not only the right thing to do but the smart thing to do”.

Many acknowledge the brunt that women bear when it comes to both climate change and the lack of access to energy – for many poor rural women in Guinea, as many as 35 hours a week are spent cooking and washing within the home, an arduous task without the modern appliances the western world take for granted.

Kandeh K. Yumkella, Chair of UN-Energy, and Director-General, United Nations Industrial Development Organisation said: “If you look at an OECD country. Just imagine what the washing machine, the dishwasher etc did for women. It opened them up to go out into the workforce.”

However, less focus is still given to capacity for women to drive change in these areas.

Winnie Byanyima, Director of the UNDP Gender Team said that by empowering women could provide the “triple wins” for sustainable development.

“If we are going to succeed on addressing climate change and fighting poverty,” she said. “We must link them together and we must link them to gender equality.

“Sustainable development is not about the environment alone. It requires us to implement the three pillars of development – the social, economic and environmental. In every case women’s equality and access to energy must be fully integrated.”

For example, Bachelet explained to the audience, research into the average energy consumption of single men and women in the western world, showed that on average men use 22% more energy.

While other research has highlighted the willingness of women to change their daily habit in order to save energy and protect the environment, compared to men.

Barrier to women’s empowerment

In the developing world, where women are often those who make the decisions within the household, there too is a huge capacity to drive change, by giving women the power to make choices.

And yet, Bachelet said, it does not happen.

“It is time empower people to make sustainable choices but for many it is not about the lack of access to sustainable choices but about not having choices at all…This is particularly true when it comes to women and girls,” she said.

While women are the primary users of energy, sources of that energy are still generally produced in a factory by a man – without taking into account the local knowledge and preferences to make them successful.

Women need to have access to education about the energy sector, the summit argued. Currently in science, technology, manufacturing and engineering in the developing world only one in five students are women and only 20% of the workforce is female.

The summit also argued women not only needed access to energy but to the rights to access that energy – through economic empowerment, property rights, and a central role in policy making.

The summit called for more a focus on the issue of gender equality ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June.

Christian Friis Bach, Danish Minister for Development Cooperation said: “The question is can we see this through a human rights framework and approach? And I really think that should be how we see it.”

VIDEO: COP17 President Maite Mashabane talks to RTCC in Durban at the UN talk’s designated Gender Day.

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