Clean Cooking: A Win-Win for Climate and a Just Transition
Session Summary:
Expanding access to clean cooking improves health by reducing harmful emissions, empowers women and girls by reducing time spent cooking and collecting fuel, and bolsters livelihoods by offering a safe reliable technology to build a business around.
Clean cooking is a powerful and often overlooked climate solution. The burning of woodfuels produces approximately a gigaton of CO2e each year, around 2% of global emissions and on par with emissions from the aviation sector. Expanding access to clean cooking also reduces short-lived climate pollutants like black carbon—household energy accounts for 51% of black carbon emissions worldwide.
The multiple benefits of clean cooking—those for the climate, for gender equality, for economic empowerment, and more—make it the ideal Just Transition solution. It mitigates climate change while simultaneously benefiting those who are (1) most vulnerable to its impacts and (2) have contributed least to the climate crisis. This session will highlight recent research that quantifies the tremendous climate benefits of transitioning from polluting fuels for cooking to cleaner fuels, such as liquified petroleum gas (LPG), ethanol, and electricity. The session will also explore the numerous co-benefits of clean cooking action, like those to women and girls.
Women and girls around the world have the most to gain from clean cooking adoption – from time savings and reduced drudgery, which can be reinvested into a formal labor opportunity, education, or leisure time; to reduced health impacts from harmful emissions which improves their overall quality of life. Expected short-term actions that will result from this session include increased interest in clean cooking as a strong sector for funding from the carbon finance community and a greater understanding of the co-benefits that arise from adoption of clean energy.
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