Cooking in refugee camps and informal settlements: A review of available technologies and impacts on the socio-economic and environmental perspective

Laboratory Testing of the Innovative Low-Cost Mewar Angithi Insert for Improving Energy Efficiency of Cooking Tasks on Three-Stone Fires in Critical Contexts

“…From an environmental point of view, the utilization of traditional biomass is a recognized contributor to deforestation and land degradation. Even if agriculture and timber industry are known as the major drivers of large scale deforestation, firewood collection and charcoal making for domestic uses can have significant impacts on local ecosystems, especially in densely populated areas [5][6][7]. Biomass burning in traditional cookstoves has also been found to be responsible for about 20% of global black carbon emissions, which are an important contributor to global warming [8].…”

“…For example, in north-western Tanzania, the influx of half million displaced people caused the depletion of trees for 5 km radius from the camps in just 6 months and the deforested area reached 10 km radius in 1 year [12]. The amount of firewood globally consumed by displaced people in refugee camps, leads to the loss of 64,000 acres of forest per year and to an estimated release of 13 million tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere [7] (around 1% of the total CO 2 emission from fuel combustion of the African continent). The utilization of traditional fuels also causes the emission of enormous quantities of pollutants at the local level, which is considered a contributor to the premature death for some 20,000 displaced people each year [13].…”

“…Usually women and young girls are in charge of the gathering of firewood, spending many hours daily. They are obligated to walk further as the trees diminish, exposing them to safety risks [3,7,14]. Refugee camps are running out of charcoal and firewood and the lack of fuel is affecting food security.…”

Towards an holistic approach to energy access in humanitarian settings: the SET4food project from technology transfer to knowledge sharing

“…There can be no food security for communities without reliable access to a fuel source for heating and cooking" (OCHA 2010). Unfortunately, access to energy in emergency and humanitarian settings is often critical and entails five key challenges: "protection, relations between hosts and displaced people, environmental problems, household energy-related natural resource restrictions, and livelihood-related challenges" (Lyytinen 2009;Barbieri et al 2017). Appropriate technologies for cooking, food preservation, and water purification are necessary to ensure an effective and efficient food utilization, which also requires a sufficient level of access to energy and fuels.…”

“…Such projects have been carried out by SAFE and other actors. However, many of them have failed for different reasons or have not been scaled up (Aste et al 2016;Barbieri et al 2017).…”