Clean Cooking Is a Win for Climate and Wellbeing
Bill Gates recently urged policymakers heading to COP30 in Brazil to focus less narrowly on emissions and rising global temperatures, and more broadly on health and economic prosperity “as the best defense against climate change.” At the Clean Cooking Alliance, we are laser-focused on a solution that covers both climate action and human prosperity: modern stoves and clean fuels for cooking.
Currently, around 2.1 billion people worldwide face energy poverty when it comes to cooking, and must rely on burning wood, charcoal, coal, or kerosene in smoky fires and inefficient stoves. Cooking this way releases 1 gigaton of climate-harming emissions every year and also undermines the ability of families to thrive in the face of climate-related risks, such as dangerous temperatures. The number of extremely hot days is set to rise in many parts of the world, and millions of people—usually women—will have no choice but to spend hours every day, even during extreme heat waves, collecting firewood and hovering over a sweltering, smoky fire. In the long term, this exposure can lead to diseases like pneumonia, heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. Worse still, this harm quickly crosses generations: women exposed to household air pollution are more likely to have babies with elevated risks of stillbirth, low birth weight, and decreased lung function. Clean-burning stoves and fuels can lower these risks and build resilience to climate shocks from the earliest stages of life.
On the economic front, Gates points out that expanding people’s access to electricity is a necessary step to creating jobs and wealth, even as decarbonizing the grid remains an important goal. Here, too, clean cooking has a critical role to play. Many governments are already shaping their national electrification plans with energy for cooking in mind, bolstered by ambitious initiatives like Mission 300. Alongside electrification efforts are many alternative cooking options like LPG, ethanol, biogas, and efficient biomass pellets that are proven and ready to go—all while reducing net global emissions. And thanks to progress in high-integrity carbon finance for clean cooking, the Green Premium—the additional cost of doing business in a sustainable way—that Gates highlights, is getting smaller all the time.
Clean cooking is one of many global investments we need to make to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. It’s an especially compelling solution because it doesn’t require a choice between climate and wellbeing: it strengthens both. It protects health and forests, cuts emissions, reduces energy poverty, and allows millions of families to cook safely and with dignity. The Government of Brazil, as the COP30 President, has given clean cooking a welcome spotlight as part of its action agenda on energy access. For anyone concerned with both climate and quality of life, clean cooking is a clear win.
