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STOVE PROJECT
Educating Himalayan Communities On Smart Cooking Practices
The current practice of open fire cooking creates several serious issues:
1. Number 1 health risk in South Asia as it causes severe lung and heart disease.
2. High levels of CO2, methane, and black carbon emission and accelerated deforestation.
3. Significant time spent collecting wood and longer cooking time.
ln the Himalayan Mountains this issue is magnified because:
1. Cutting of trees for cooking means less roots to hold the soil, leading to more landslides and floods.
2. Restricted access to healthcare facilities further necessitates exploring preventative solutions for
smoke-induced lung and heart disease.
3. Since the Himalayan glaciers are responsible for fresh water supply to 600 million people, safeguarding them is imperative.
To work on this challenge, HET provides clean stoves at a subsidized rate and educates villagers on the importance of using them.
1. Clean biomass cook stoves reduce the harmful emissions released by traditional cooking methods by up to 80% while cooking time and wood requirements are reduced by up to 65%. This means significantly lower contributions to climate change, cleaner air, fewer trees being cut and a lower risk of diseases.
2. Rural mountain dwellers are also comfortable using the stove, as it’s easy to transition to from their current cooking method. A clean stove saves an average of 5.6 trees from being cut and 1.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions from entering the atmosphere every year!
