It’s hard to know where to start in India. There are so many people who need our help; the sheer magnitude of the problem is overwhelming. (Perhaps we should ask Bono to drop by and give the indoor pollution problem some much needed publicity instead of hanging out with celebrity politicians!) But you have to start somewhere and so we began in Gujarat state – home of Gandhi’s birthplace.

The images you see here document the installation of our very first wood fire cook stove into an Indian home – through our Kingdom Diamond Circle of Life program we hope many, many more will soon follow.

When we first entered the home you see in the photos the usual cooking on an open fire was in progress. Even though cooking had just begun the room was thick with smoke that made our eyes water and our throats sore. Breathing was punctuated with much coughing. Once you’ve experienced the problem of having an ordinary open fire in a confined space you can really appreciate why indoor fire pollution is one of the biggest killers in India.

While diseases like AIDS and malaria get the headlines, indoor pollution is quietly killing 1.6 million people every year. That’s a horrifying 1 death every 20 seconds. It’s hardly surprising when you consider that World Energy estimates that the amount of smoke from an open fire in a confined room is the equivalent of smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, everyday. Obviously this is no environment to raise children.

In fact, indoor smoke pollution leading to pneumonia is the biggest killer in children under 5 years of age. The painful symptoms include respiratory infection, ear and eye irritations, chest pains, and severe headaches. It is the highly toxic carbon monoxide created by open fires that causes the problem. One of the compounds in wood, it diminishes the female placental blood and increases her chances of giving birth to a seriously underweight child. It is a vicious circle. The mother must cook to feed her children yet by in doing so on an open fire she is slowly killing her whole family. That’s why the Kingdom Diamonds cook stoves are such lifesavers. They require less wood to create the same heat, and the emissions are very low due to improved mixing of gases, air and flame.

In short, a cook stove is a simple yet highly effective way to help Indian families. Of course this is just the beginning. We don’t underestimate the amount of work ahead of us, and unfortunately we can’t help everyone. But we can try our best. And that’s what we’re busy doing. So please help us spread the word. Together we can change the world.

Ministry of Environment & Forests have introduced the new national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) in 2009 for the extended list of 12 pollutants which are more closely related to health.

The Government though the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy has taken various steps to control and prevent indoor air pollution, through National Programme on Biogas Development to provide alternatives to burning firewood, agricultural residues, cattle dung and coal as fuel. National Programme on Improved Chulhas has been taken up to promote thermally efficient and low smoke stoves/smokeless chulhas. IEC activities through electronic and print media are undertaken to give publicity to the programmes. Women Education programmes are also organised in villages to generate awareness about the hazards of burning firewood, agricultural wastes, cattle dung in traditional chulhas and benefits of the biogas technology etc.

This information was given by Minister for Health and Family Welfare Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad in written reply to a question raised in Rajya Sabha today.

Source from: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India.

As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.

In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot — also known as black carbon — from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called “low hanging fruit” — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming. “It is clear to any person who cares about climate change that this will have a huge impact on the global environment,” said Dr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who is working with the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi on a project to help poor families acquire new stoves.

“In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time,” said Dr. Ramanathan, who left India 40 years ago but returned to his native land for the project.

Better still, decreasing soot could have a rapid effect. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for years, soot stays there for a few weeks. Converting to low-soot cookstoves would remove the warming effects of black carbon quickly, while shutting a coal plant takes years to substantially reduce global CO2 concentrations.

But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government.

In Asia and Africa, cookstoves produce the bulk of black carbon, although it also emanates from diesel engines and coal plants there. In the United States and Europe, black carbon emissions have already been reduced significantly by filters and scrubbers.

Like tiny heat-absorbing black sweaters, soot particles warm the air and melt the ice by absorbing the sun’s heat when they settle on glaciers. One recent study estimated that black carbon might account for as much as half of Arctic warming. While the particles tend to settle over time and do not have the global reach of greenhouse gases, they do travel, scientists now realize. Soot from India has been found in the Maldive Islands and on the Tibetan Plateau; from the United States, it travels to the Arctic. The environmental and geopolitical implications of soot emissions are enormous. Himalayan glaciers are expected to lose 75 percent of their ice by 2020, according to Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a glacier specialist from the Indian state of Sikkim.

These glaciers are the source of most of the major rivers in Asia. The short-term result of glacial melt is severe flooding in mountain communities. The number of floods from glacial lakes is already rising sharply, Professor Hasnain said. Once the glaciers shrink, Asia’s big rivers will run low or dry for part of the year, and desperate battles over water are certain to ensue in a region already rife with conflict.

Doctors have long railed against black carbon for its devastating health effects in poor countries. The combination of health and environmental benefits means that reducing soot provides a “very big bang for your buck,” said Erika Rosenthal, a senior lawyer at Earth Justice, a Washington organization. “Now it’s in everybody’s self-interest to deal with things like cookstoves — not just because hundreds of thousands of women and children far away are dying prematurely.”

In the United States, black carbon emissions are indirectly monitored and minimized through federal and state programs that limit small particulate emissions, a category of particles damaging to human health that includes black carbon. But in March, a bill was introduced in Congress that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to specifically regulate black carbon and direct aid to black carbon reduction projects abroad, including introducing cookstoves in 20 million homes. The new stoves cost about $20 and use solar power or are more efficient. Soot is reduced by more than 90 percent. The solar stoves do not use wood or dung. Other new stoves simply burn fuel more cleanly, generally by pulverizing the fuel first and adding a small fan that improves combustion.

That remote rural villages like Kohlua could play an integral role in tackling the warming crisis is hard to imagine. There are no cars — the village chief’s ancient white Jeep sits highly polished but unused in front of his house, a museum piece. There is no running water and only intermittent electricity, which powers a few light bulbs.

The 1,500 residents here grow wheat, mustard and potatoes and work as day laborers in Agra, home of the Taj Majal, about two hours away by bus.

They earn about $2 a day and, for the most part, have not heard about climate change. But they have noticed frequent droughts in recent years that scientists say may be linked to global warming. Crops ripen earlier and rot more frequently than they did 10 years ago. The villagers are aware, too, that black carbon can corrode. In Agra, cookstoves and diesel engines are forbidden in the area around the Taj Majal, because soot damages the precious facade.

Still, replacing hundreds of millions of cookstoves — the source of heat, food and sterile water — is not a simple matter. “I’m sure they’d look nice, but I’d have to see them, to try them,” said Chetram Jatrav, as she squatted by her cookstove making tea and a flatbread called roti. Her three children were coughing.

She would like a stove that “made less smoke and used less fuel” but cannot afford one, she said, pushing a dung cake bought for one rupee into the fire. She had just bought her first rolling pin so her flatbread could come out “nice and round,” as her children had seen in elementary school. Equally important, the open fires of cookstoves give some of the traditional foods their taste. Urging these villagers to make roti in a solar cooker meets the same mix of rational and irrational resistance as telling an Italian that risotto tastes just fine if cooked in the microwave.

In March, the cookstove project, called Surya, began “market testing” six alternative cookers in villages, in part to quantify their benefits. Already, the researchers fret that the new stoves look like scientific instruments and are fragile; one broke when a villager pushed twigs in too hard.

But if black carbon is ever to be addressed on a large scale, acceptance of the new stoves is crucial. “I’m not going to go to the villagers and say CO2 is rising, and in 50 years you might have floods,” said Dr. Ibrahim Rehman, Dr. Ramanathan’s collaborator at the Energy and Resources Institute. “I’ll tell her about the lungs and her kids and I know it will help with climate change as well.”

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: April 15, 2009

Source from: New York Times

Thick acrid smoke rising from stoves and fires inside homes is associated with around 1.6 million deaths per year in developing countries – that’s one life lost every 20 seconds to the killer in the kitchen.

Nearly half of the world continues to cook with solid fuels such as dung, wood, agricultural residues and coal. Smoke from burning these fuels gives off a poisonous cocktail of particles and chemicals that bypass the body’s defences and more than doubles the risk of respiratory illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia.

The indoor concentration of health-damaging pollutants from a typical wood-fired cooking stove creates carbon monoxide and other noxious fumes at anywhere between seven and 500 times over the allowable limits (see table below).

Day in day out, and for hours at a time, rural women and their children in particular are subjected to levels of smoke in their homes that far exceed international safety standards. The World Energy Assessment* estimates that the amount of smoke from these fires is the equivalent of consuming two packs of cigarettes a day – and yet, these families are faced with what amounts to a non-choice – not cooking using these fuels, or not eating.

Rural women and their families also pay a high economic price for keeping the fire burning. Up to three mornings a week are spent collecting fuel such as wood. This perpetual toil denies poor rural women the chance to be more productive through paid work that would raise their family’s income, improve the standard of living and enhance their nutritional and health status. And in the crisis-stricken Darfur region of Sudan, the chore has taken on a perilous dimension following the rape, kidnap, beatings and murder of women leaving refugee camps to search for wood.

So what can be done to put an end to indoor air pollution? Finding cleaner solutions is the main challenge. Gases, liquids and electricity are the main alternatives. Although today these energy sources derive mainly from fossil fuels, this needs not be the case in the future when renewable energies may ease the pressure on natural ecosystems. Other steps include the recognition and action by governments, the aid community, civil society and other key actors that indoor smoke is a huge blight on the lives of rural women and their children.

Two years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg the Global Partnership for Clean Indoor Air was launched with the backing of WHO and the international community. As such, a growing network of experts and organizations are responding to the challenge by finding innovative and affordable solutions that deploy cleaner stoves, fuels and smoke hoods. Their implementation will require the development of viable and sustainable markets, as created through the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) Rural Energy Challenge for LPG delivery and consumption, a public-private partnership including UNDP, also established at the WSSD. But this is just the beginning. WHO recently published the first-ever comprehensive Atlas of Children’s Environmental Health as a means of drawing attention to and increasing support for reducing indoor air pollution (and other environmental health issues). We need the same attention paid to this “killer in the kitchen” as is paid to other major killers.

*The World Energy Assessment is a joint publication of UNDP, the UN Department for Economic & Social Affairs and the World Energy Council.

Note: using 1 Kg of wood/hour in 15 ACH 40 m3 kitchens emits, among other pollutants, the following:

Source: Based on the UNDP/DESA/WEC World Energy Assessment

KingdomDiamonds Trade Marques

View our letter here.

We’d heard about Northern Laos and what a tough, challenging landscape it is for so many people trying to eek out an existence from the land, so as part of the Kingdom Diamonds Circle of Life program we decided we had to come and see it for ourselves.

Where there’s hardship and suffering we try to be there to help if we can. But no matter how fertile your imagination is, or what you think you know, we soon found out that nothing can prepare you for experiencing the real thing.

The jungle is dense to the point of being impenetrable, as if nature had a tough planning day and stuck too much vegetation into too small an area. Trying to struggle your way through it is to be assaulted by thousands of giant leaves that scrape, slap and tear at the skin, while you slip and slide your way over terrain intent on tripping you with roots and vines that snake across the jungle floor. The humidity is so thick you could carve it and serve it on a platter. And then there’re the insects – every imaginable size and species, each one seemingly intent on extracting its lunch from your flesh.

And this is where the people and their children, yes children as young as five, sweat and strain and toil day after day to find enough wood to fuel their fires and cook their food. That’s their cycle of life – searching the jungle, gathering wood that is in short supply, hauling it out to the road and stacking it to be collected by a rickety cart, which is drawn by hand. Back breaking doesn’t begin to describe how hard this work is.

But the hardship doesn’t stop there. Once the wood is burned it creates vast amounts of pollution that hangs thick in the air of their homes and fills the valley basin. These unfortunate people are copping lung-fulls of smoke every time they cook a meal, but what else can they do? Gathering the wood is simply a matter of life or death for them.

That’s where we come in. As simple as it sounds, by donating a cookstove to a local family we are literally changing their lives for good. Because the cookstove is so efficient in its use of wood, the people only need to gather a fraction of what they normally would. This saves them time and tons of hard work so they can devote more time to other things like growing food. Perhaps more importantly the cookstove burns cleaner, significantly reducing pollution and helping create a healthier environment. In short, a cookstove can help save lives.

One of our goals is to give lots of cookstoves to the people here in Northern Laos. Having met and spent time with the beautiful people in this amazing place, how could we not?

Of course we could always do with some support ourselves. We need you to contact us and see how you can help, and there are plenty of ways you can – even if it’s just to follow us online and tell your friends and help us get the word out.

If you’ve just read this you know how important it is. So get on board with us at the Kingdom Diamonds Circle of Life program. Together we can change the world.