Nigeria: Saving Trees, Saving Lives Using Clean Cookstoves
Trees are part of ecosystem that provide a balance for nature. Trees provide man with shade, serve as domestic fuel and protect the environment from harsh weather conditions but these same trees are gradually disappearing from the earth’s surface due change to unhealthy human activities such as illegal logging, industrial pollution as well as climatic changes.
The use of trees as firewood for cooking in homes has been proven to have huge health risk on humans especially women and children who are constantly exposed to it and this has lead to calls for the use of improved, cheap and fuel efficient cookstoves to safeguard public health.
Not less than 93, 000 women and children in Nigeria are said to die of Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) which is caused by firewood used in cooking.
Environmental experts meeting in Abuja under the leadership of the Nigerian Alliance for Clean cookstoves in partnership with the Heinrich Boll Foundation and the International Center for Energy, Environment and Development (ICEED), explained that statistics made available by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that about 1.6 million women and children globally die of smoke inhaled from firewood cooking.