Public-Private Partnership Forms to Push Cleaner-Burning Cookstoves
The Obama administration will allocate $53 million over the next five years to deploy clean-burning cookstoves in countries whose residents currently burn wood, dried dung and charcoal for fuel.
Spread throughout six different federal agencies — the bulk of it through the National Institutes of Health — the funding is part of a major new global initiative spearheaded by the U.N. Foundation. Jacob Moss, director of the U.S. Cookstoves Initiative at the State Department, said America’s contribution to the program does not call for new resources.
“There’s no reason to suspect that the commitments that were made will not be met in spite of the lean budget times,” Moss said.
Specifically, Moss said, through 2016 the agency contribution breakdown will be: $24.7 million from the National Institutes of Health, $12.5 million from the Department of Energy, $9 million from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, $6 million from U.S. EPA, and $1 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All the funding comes from existing programs within each agency and does not require direct approval from Congress.
Leslie Cordes, interim executive director of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, said the U.S. funding is part of a larger $60 million package that also includes funding from companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Morgan Stanley, as well as the governments of Germany, Norway, Denmark and Malta.
The goal of the alliance is for clean, efficient stoves run on fuels like natural gas, electricity and solar power to find their way into 100 million homes by 2020. The results, those who work with the program said, will be a reduction in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
It will also improve health and quality of life, particularly for women and children, who often inhale the fumes from primitive fuels used in developing countries.