[Stoves] News: Charcoal stoves to save Haiti or the World

Fri Oct 14 17:43:00 CDT 2016

Nikihl,
With few words and less time to type them, please just check out www.legacy found.org
Kind regards,
Richard Stanley

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 14, 2016, at 9:59 AM, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com> wrote:

Haiti might be the sterling example of the failure of official aid - or sophomoric aid entrepreneurs like the Clintons - in "improved biomass stoves". I hope someone on this list takes up the challenge of thinking this right; I can't. Saving forests, lives and climates is elite chatter; children continue to be victims. 

Haiti is in the news again. Clinton Foundation has rushed with help and is trying to raise money. Members of the Clinton Foundation Community Respond to Hurricane Matthew; Ways to Support.

The Clintons have been saving Haiti for years now. ABC News reports on Clinton Foundation Statement just issued; its earlier item "Friends of Bill": Clinton Controversy in Haiti after 2010 Earthquake.

I know how friends get together to respond to an emergency. I too was called by friends to help with the Haiti earthquake. I want to write here about STOVES in Haiti, potentially a sterling case study in failure of donor dreams, 700 miles from the US with some 2 million poor households. 

But stoves need fuel, a primary problem in disaster management. This from Aid convoys arrive as Haiti gauges full extent of disaster (8 October 2016) on USAID emergency relief:  

"The mother of three children whose home was destroyed said officials were handing out wheat, beans, oil and salt.

"Yes, they brought food, but it's not sufficient," she said. "There's no water. There's no charcoal." (Emphasis added). 

What good are stoves without fuel? Why haven't disaster response teams and refugee camp administrators ignored the basic problem of cooking? (I vaguely remember that in the refugee camps I worked in back 45 years ago, there were kerosene rations. They were meant to be used for lighting, but some people had kerosene stoves and kerosene was indeed used for cooking.) 

A USAID blogger claimed in 2014 "Cooking With Green Charcoal Helps to Reduce Deforestation in Haiti", on a biochar project by Carbon Roots International. 

Matthew may have felled more trees than this or other such "carbon" projects, and fallen trees have killed people (so much for saving trees). 

Crop/tree loss may mean starvation for Haitians. 

GACC has a fantastic Country Action Plan for Haiti, managed in Washington DC and financed in part by Global Affairs Canada. I am dumbfounded by the promises: 

"The program is expected to lead to a broad range of environmental, health, economic, and women’s empowerment benefits across Haiti. The specific goals of this program will focus on delivering measureable environmental benefits, including reduction in deforestation caused by tree harvesting for charcoal production, lessened land degradation, flooding, and erosion, reduced depletion of watershed and biodiversity, and lower emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants. In addition, black carbon and other short-lived climate pollutants emitted from the combustion of wood and charcoal in traditional stoves are a potent climate forcer, and thus the substitution of clean fuels is expected to result in a net climate benefit. The application of robust stove standards and testing protocols is expected to shift the market to better cooking technologies and cleaner fuels, which will reduce black carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Implementation of the plan is also expected to deliver measureable health benefits including reductions in chronic and acute illness. The plan is expected to increase women’s empowerment through reductions in the drudgery of fuel collection and exposure to gender-based violence and physical strain from carrying fuel, and will improve livelihoods through lower expenditures for solid fuel for cooking and the resultant health care from associated illnesses." 

What gobbledygook is this?? 

I need to inhale, not just smoke. 

I don't mind the objectives, nor the dreams of fetishists. However, I think i) there is no basis in speculating that "measureable environmental benefits" can be delivered in practice; ii) if "clean fuels" is GACC agenda rather than "clean combustion", it is a surrogate for gas and electricity companies and it should stop messing with the pretense of stove testing for boiling water; iii) "measureable health benefits" require definition of a baseline, as predicted for the population under consideration, and assumptions of fixed risk factors, neglect of ignored variables. 

The claims of "women’s empowerment through reductions in the drudgery of fuel collection and exposure to gender-based violence and physical strain from carrying fuel, and will improve livelihoods through lower expenditures for solid fuel for cooking and the resultant health care from associated illnesses" are utterly ridiculous propaganda. 

There is some prima facie validity to the argument that lighting may have reduce the risk of sexual violence: 

 Haitian women live in fear of rape in post-quake camps (2010), Blow-up solar lantern lights up Haiti's prospects (2012).

But also UKAid VAWG Helpdesk research report VAWG and Energy in Camp-based Settings (Anna Park and Erica Fraser, November 2015), with a stark conclusion: 

"Most evaluations conclude that the root causes of VAWG are complex and cannot be addressed by the distribution of energy products."

It is only a research review, but it is also common sense. 

"Interventions to date have focused mostly on energy products, rather than energy services (Bellanca, 2014). This query has found a need for further research on the potential benefits of situating the provision of energy products within a broader focus on systems and context at the camp-level, and to work in a coordinated way with protection actors to provide security, build income-generating skills and address underlying cultural/social norms that perpetuate VAWG. "

A "focus on systems and context"?? Ah, what a silly notion (though we make our decisions every day just on that basis, subject to information.) 

Are academics and GACC paid to be blind? (My definition of academics: the group that silently watches a murder in its midst but will not testify to it until a peer-reviewed paper is published in a journal.)

Nikhil

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