[Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

[Xavier Brandao]

Dear all,

I was in contact with Fabio Riva and Francesco Lombardi. They have seen 
my emails to the list, and wanted to bring a clarification.

Please find Fabio's email below:

"Dear Xavier,

Thank you very much for having cited our paper in the discussion. 
Please, consider this recommendation for the next citations: we do not 
actually critic the WBT per se, but the way through which the 
practitioners and the literature perform the WBT and report the results. 
Indeed, we are perfectly aware that the WBT has many drawbacks and 
unresolved issues, but we are still trying to support this in a 
scientific way.

With our article “Fuzzy interval propagation of uncertainties in 
experimental analysis for improved and traditional three–stone fire 
cookstoves" we demonstrated a different problem: so far, the literature 
reports mainly data coming from an average of few replicates that can 
lead to misinterpreted evaluations of ICSs’ performance if the 
uncertainties are not considered. The final goal of the article is 
therefore making people aware of the possible errors and 
misinterpretations when they do not perform accurate statistical data 
processing.

Therefore, the sentence that you have highlighted in the forwarded email 
should not be interpreted as “the WBT itself has epistemic uncertainties 
that may lead to incorrect ICS’s performance evaluation”, because it is 
not actually the result of the work. Rather, the main outcome and result 
is this:

“IF you do not consider the WBTs uncertainties (viz. the uncertainties 
related to lab replicates performed with the WBT) when you report and 
analyse data àTHEN you might misinterpret the real ICSs’ performance”. 
So, we are not criticizing the “WBT uncertainties” per se, because it is 
normal to have uncertainties when you perform a lab measures (they are 
too many in the WBT, true, and they must be urgently limited! but it is 
not the point of the article).

This conclusion can be applied to all the protocols that have intrinsic 
uncertainties. The reason why we have considered only the WBT-based 
tests is because it is the most adopted protocol in the literature and 
there are many data available.

I hope it could be clearer now. _I would be grateful if you could 
forward this message also to Ron and the bioenergy list_.

Thanks again for the passion and the effort you put for the testing 
community.

Best regards,

Fabio"

It is really great to have some insight from them. As I was replying to 
Fabio, I don't know if it is at all possible to "fix" the WBT. And doing 
this fixing, if it is at all possible, will take a lot of time. 
Researchers and testers are very busy with other things, and funders/the 
GACC/project implementers want to act now.

Let's be a bit realistic for one second. If nothing is done, testers 
will keep using the WBT, and project implementers being project 
implementers, they WILL poorly interpret the results. We all know how it 
works in international development projects. Some projects are planned 
very well and run very smoothly, but let's admit that more often than 
not, nothing really goes according to the plan.

Testers and project leaders will hastily test the stoves with a limited 
number of iterations because they are already late on the project 
planning, or they have limited human resources or funds, not the right 
equipment, or the testing consultant is in the country for a short 
amount of time. They will think it is good enough. They will take hasty 
decisions, and start projects based on very thin evidence. This is 
unfortunately how it happens all the time. It's like saying the the 
project implementers: here is a car but the brakes are not working well, 
don't drive too fast with it. Misinterpretations and misuse of the 
results will be done, because the WBT is so easy to misuse. A very solid 
protocol is what we need. We need a great tool, a fool-proof tool, a 
tool we can rely on.

Another point is that more than a few people have been trying to fix the 
WBT for long time, maybe 10 years or more. Maybe since it was invented, 
in 1987? Can it be fixed at all? Even "improved", even with a large 
number of test iterations, can the WBT give any satisfactory results 
leading to good decisions?

But more importantly, even with statistical data processing, 3 big 
issues remain with the WBT. Can they be solved at all? Fabio Riva and 
Francesco Lombardi admit these 3 issues still remain.

They are not criticizing the WBT per se, in their paper. But I, and many 
others, are. Based on their findings, we are criticizing the WBT, 
because the WBT allows for easy misinterpretation, the WBT allows large 
mistakes to be made. Because in international development projects, and 
especially in stove projects, it is so easy to make bad decisions.

Often, researchers and scientists don't take position, because it is, 
they think, not their job. Then others in the stove sector have the 
responsibility to take a position, and make a choice. I believe their 
researches allow us to take that position, and to ask for the promotion 
of the WBT to be stopped.

The wisest step, in my opinion, remains to stop using this protocol, 
until it is fixed or we definitely move to a better one.

I remind you that you can support the initiative here: 
xvr.brandao at gmail.com <mailto:xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
And see other protocols, the HTP and CSI, here: 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5rmmRmIsdlnQlRQX3A1cXVOQ3M?usp=sharing 
<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5rmmRmIsdlnQlRQX3A1cXVOQ3M?usp=sharing>

Looking forward to your comments.

Best,

Xavier
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