Piloting improved cookstoves in India.

Despite the potential of improved cookstoves to reduce the adverse environmental and health impacts of solid fuel use, their adoption and use remains low. Social marketing-with its focus on the marketing mix of promotion, product, price, and place-offers a useful way to understand household behaviors and design campaigns to change biomass fuel use. We report on a series of pilots across 3 Indian states that use different combinations of the marketing mix. We find sales varying from 0% to 60%. Behavior change promotion that combined door-to-door personalized demonstrations with information pamphlets was effective. When given a choice amongst products, households strongly preferred an electric stove over improved biomass-burning options. Among different stove attributes, reduced cooking time was considered most valuable by those adopting a new stove. Households clearly identified price as a significant barrier to adoption, while provision of discounts (e.g., rebates given if households used the stove) or payments in installments were related to higher purchase. Place-based factors such as remoteness and nongovernmental organization operations significantly affected the ability to supply and convince households to buy and use improved cookstoves. Collectively, these pilots point to the importance of continued and extensive testing of messages, pricing models, and different stove types before scale-up. Thus, we caution that a one-size-fits-all approach will not boost improved cookstove adoption.

Reductions in indoor black carbon concentrations from improved biomass stoves in rural India.

Deployment of improved biomass burning cookstoves is recognized as a black carbon (BC) mitigation measure that has the potential to achieve health benefits and climate cobenefits. Yet, few field based studies document BC concentration reductions (and resulting human exposure) resulting from improved stove usage. In this paper, data are presented from 277 real-world cooking sessions collected during two field studies to document the impacts on indoor BC concentrations inside village kitchens as a result of switching from traditional stoves to improved forced draft (FD) stoves. Data collection utilized new low-cost cellphone methods to monitor BC, cooking duration, and fuel consumption. A cross sectional study recorded a reduction of 36% in BC during cooking sessions. An independent paired sample study demonstrated a statistically significant reduction of 40% in 24 h BC concentrations when traditional stoves were replaced with FD stoves. Reductions observed in these field studies differ from emission factor reductions (up to 99%) observed under controlled conditions in laboratory studies. Other nonstove sources (e.g., kerosene lamps, ambient concentrations) likely offset the reductions. Health exposure studies should utilize reductions determined by field measurements inside village kitchens, in conjunction with laboratory data, to assess the health impacts of new cooking technologies.