Progress Report on International Standards Development – Working Group Meetings
We have just completed a successful week of standards meetings (ISO Technical Committee 285 for Clean Cookstoves and Clean Cooking Solutions) in Antigua, Guatemala. I’d like to take this opportunity to share an update on our week in Guatemala and our overall progress in developing standards.
Why do we need standards and why do we need them now?
Based on what the Alliance hears from our national government, investor, and donor partners, standards are a high priority for the clean cooking sector. These groups are looking for clear and comparable evaluations of technologies, just like in other mature industries. For designing national policies and evaluating potential investments and projects, they want to know the potential of various technologies to reach health, environment, and livelihoods goals. These groups are relying on the technical experts to develop methods and indicators that will support decisions and be easy to interpret. Developing standards is a challenging process, and final standards are still on the horizon. The meetings in Guatemala this month were part of the Alliance’s ongoing work to develop standards.
The government, investor, and donor groups also know that we need a standards framework in place now. The ISO International Workshop Agreement was developed in 2012 with input from over 20 countries, to provide interim guidelines as the standards process continued. The IWA text acknowledged the current limitations, but this agreement also represented significant progress. The IWA formalized:
- linkages to World Health Organization health guidelines and environmental goals,
- a tiered system to provide clarity to non-technical audiences and communicate both incremental and leap-frogging progress, and
- a framework with multiple performance indicators to help decision-makers select stoves based on their priorities.
The IWA is already driving many new investments in our sector and supporting progress towards cleaner, more efficient, and safer technologies. Thus, even though the IWA will likely be replaced by new standards in the future, we need to continue to use the IWA in the interim to maintain our momentum.
Progress from Working and Task Groups Meeting, 13 – 16 October 2014, Antigua, Guatemala
These views were shared by the experts that gathered for the recent TC 285 Working and Task Groups meeting. The experts discussed how to develop clear testing methods, with easy-to-communicate results, that reflect the needs of standards users – governments, investors, donors, manufacturers, and consumers – the households that currently use solid fuels and that bear the associated health and environmental burdens. We also discussed the challenges with current standards, and agreed to continue to communicate about how results can be interpreted.
Our four Working Groups are developing:
- a conceptual framework for testing,
- harmonized laboratory protocols,
- field testing guidelines, and
- social impacts guidelines.
The WG experts discussed feedback submitted by dozens of participating countries on the scope of the standards documents. To maintain progress towards practical guidelines for our sector, we left Guatemala with clear drafting timelines and responsibilities. There is a reason these are called Working Groups!
In addition, our Fuels Task Group is developing priorities for fuels standards and evaluating existing standards for relevance and gaps, which can guide TC 285 on standards that may need to be developed in the future. Our Communications Task group is developing an outreach strategy to strengthen participation from across the sector and raise awareness about standards progress among governments, donors, investors, and the global community.
Global Collaboration for Standards Development
TC 285 is setting records within ISO – among all ISO Technical Committees, we have the highest percentage of developing country participation. Bringing our voices together in Guatemala was a great celebration of our groundbreaking efforts. For TC 285 experts who were not able to join our recent meeting, we will be sharing outcomes from the week to get broader feedback and participation. We also encourage other interested stakeholders to contribute your perspectives to standards development. Whether you have a technical background or not, whether you are a social scientist, investor, or manufacturer, if you share your experiences and priorities, our standards will become more valuable and relevant for supporting progress in the clean cooking sector.