Welcome to the documentation of OnStove!#
Universal access to clean cooking#
Clean cooking is defined as fuel and stove combinations meeting the standards set by the World Health Organization’s Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality: Household Fuel Combustion [1]. The purpose of these guidelines is to protect public health from Household Air Pollution (HAP). As of 2020, roughly 2.4 billion people still lacked access to clean cooking globally and were therefore forced to rely on traditional cooking solutions instead [2]. The use of traditional cooking is estimated to cause approximately 3.2 million pre-mature deaths annually and has large implications on numerous Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as gender equality, environmental quality and poverty reduction [2]. Due to its widespread impacts, universal access to clean cooking was included in the 17 SDGs agreed upon by the UN General Assembly in 2015 (SDG target 7.1, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services) [3]. Reaching this target has been proven difficult and currently we are not on track of reaching universal clean cooking by its intended target year (2030). According to the latest tracking SDG7 report, 2.1 billion people are still expected to not have access to clean cooking assuming the efforts remain the same as currently [2].
What is OnStove?#
OnStove is developed by the division of Energy Systems at KTH together with partners. The tool is a geospatial, raster-based tool determining the net-benefit of different cooking solutions selected by the user for raster grid cell of a given study area. The tool takes into account four benefits of adopting clean cooking: reduced morbidity, mortality, emissions and time saved, as well as three costs: capital, fuel and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. In each grid cell of the study area the stove with the highest net-benefit is chosen.
Scope and Objective#
OnStove produces scenarios depicting the “true” cost of clean cooking. The benefits and costs produced by the tool are to be interpreted as the benefits and costs one could expect if the clean cooking transition was to happen now (overnight change). Furthermore, these results are to be interpreted as an upper bound of net-benefits following a switch to cleaner stoves. OnStove can be used by planners and policy makers to identify whether various combinations of interventions in their settings would be worth the potential benefits that could be captured. The tool answers questions such as:
Which technology has the highest net-benefit in different parts of the area of interest?
What are the needed investments in order to reach universal clean cooking access in the area of interest?
How is the investment split between different stove-types?
What is the net-benefit in different areas?
What are the deaths avoided by adopting clean cooking?
How much time can be saved by adopting clean cooking?