Assessment of cookstove stacking in Northern Ghana using surveys and stove use monitors

Abstract

Biomass burning for home energy use is a major health and environmental concern. While transitioning to cleaner cooking technologies has the potential to generate significant health and environmental benefits, prior efforts to introduce improved cookstoves have encountered many hurdles. Here, we focus on the increased stove use hurdle; households tend to use improved stoves alongside their traditional stoves rather than replacing them entirely, a phenomenon called cookstove "stacking." This work provides a systematic, multi-method assessment of households' cooking behaviors and cookstove stacking in the context of a 200-home randomized cookstove intervention study in Northern Ghana. Two stoves were selected for the intervention, a locally made rocket stove (Gyapa) and the Philips HD4012 LS gasifier stove. There were four intervention groups: a control group, a group given two Gyapa stoves, a group given two Philips stoves, and a group given one of each. Two stoves were distributed to each home in an attempt to induce more substitution away from traditional stoves. Adoption and usage patterns were quantified using temperature loggers at a subset of homes, as well as quarterly surveying in all households. We find that using multiple stoves each day is common practice within each intervention group, and that the two groups given at least one Gyapa had the largest reductions in traditional stove use relative to the control group, though use of traditional stoves remained high in all groups.

Household Determinants of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) as a Cooking Fuel in SW Cameroon

“…One recognised policy issue in supporting communities to switch to cleaner fuels/technologies is the problem of ‘fuel/stove stacking’ whereby households that use cleaner cooking fuels/technologies do so alongside traditional polluting fuels/technologies (Dickinson et al 2016). In the LACE peri-urban area, only 9.5% of the 70% of LPG users indicated doing so exclusively, and in the rural area, only 1.2% reported exclusive use of LPG (70% indicating no use of LPG).…”

Quantifying the Contribution to Uncertainty in Mortality Attributed to Household, Ambient, and Joint Exposure to PM2.5From Residential Solid Fuel Use

“…The large health burden attributed to SFU has motivated interventions aimed at replacing traditional cookstoves with cleaner‐burning fuels and combustion devices (e.g., M. L. Clark et al, , ; Mortimer et al, ; Piedrahita et al, ; Ruiz‐Mercado et al, ; S. Clark et al, ); however, there are large uncertainties in the number of deaths attributed to exposure to PM 2.5 from SFU. These uncertainties originate from uncertain input parameters as well as the contribution of health risk from other ambient PM 2.5 sources.…”

Household air pollution, health, and climate change: cleaning the air

“…It is also observed, although not as systematically studied, that most of these IBCs do not completely replace traditional stoves, but are rather 'stacked' in that they are used along with a certain continuation of traditional devices (Piedrahita et al 2011, Lewis and Pattanayak 2012, Rehfuess et al 2014, Pillarisetti et al 2014. The health benefit, however, depends even more on reducing the use of traditional polluting devices than directly using newer cleaner ones.…”