Clean cooking as part of the UN 2030 Agenda
The United Nations 2030 Agenda sets out, under Sustainable Development Goal 7, the commitment to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.
For many people, especially in high income countries, it is easy to overlook how polluting a simple daily activity like cooking can be when clean energy systems are not available.
Clean cooking in Sub-Saharan Africa
Globally, around 2.4 billion people still lack access to clean cooking energy. The situation is particularly severe in Sub-Saharan Africa, where only 17 percent of the population has access to clean cooking options.
An international research group has developed OnStove, an open source geospatial tool designed to compare the relative potential of different types of cookstoves based on their costs and benefits, with a specific focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. The results show that highly polluting fuels are still widely used, often with poor performance outcomes.
The study, titled A geospatial approach to understanding clean cooking challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, was published in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability.
Growing lack of access to clean cooking energy
Identifying alternative cooking options could deliver significant benefits in terms of health, time savings and emissions reduction. However, this requires targeted policies to transform and improve energy use. OnStove helps assess critical gaps and supports the design of effective transition strategies.
In practical terms, clean cooking energy refers to the use of fuels and stoves that meet the standards set by the World Health Organization guidelines for indoor air quality.
Between 2000 and 2020, the number of people without access to clean cooking energy increased by nearly 50 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The use of polluting fuels is estimated to cause around 3.2 million premature deaths every year and continues to slow progress towards gender equality and environmental quality goals.
For this reason, access to clean cooking energy is explicitly included in Sustainable Development Goal 7 and is closely linked to the achievement of several other objectives within the 2030 Agenda.
The role of geography in the energy transition
Geographical factors also play a key role in slowing the transition to cleaner cooking systems. Geographic information systems, or GIS, help explain how fuel availability, infrastructure access and fuel prices vary across locations, providing valuable insights for better planning.
GIS tools can support policymakers in identifying areas where the shift to cleaner cooking solutions is lagging behind local potential and can help guide policies that encourage targeted investments.
OnStove calculates the net value of benefits associated with different stove types in specific regions. These benefits include reduced morbidity and mortality, lower emissions and time savings, as well as an assessment of fuel, operation and maintenance costs.
This geographical approach is essential because it highlights the economic conditions, fuel availability and infrastructure gaps, such as lack of electricity access, that can either hinder or enable the adoption of clean cooking energy in specific contexts.
OnStove compares nine types of cookstoves across three categories: traditional stoves using biomass and charcoal, which are unsustainable and contribute to deforestation and rising greenhouse gas emissions; improved stoves, including natural biomass and forced draft technologies as well as pellet and forced draft charcoal stoves; and clean options, such as electric, LPG and biogas stoves.
Women and the clean cooking transition
The analysis also considers two distinct perspectives, a social and a private one. The social perspective includes the net costs of stoves and fuels, avoided health costs, the value of time saved and externalities such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions and health impacts. The private perspective focuses only on reduced morbidity and mortality and the time saved in fuel collection and cooking.
Finally, the researchers examined behavioural barriers that limit the adoption of cleaner cooking systems. Time savings and health considerations may not always be prioritised by households, particularly by male heads of household who often make key decisions.
In many cases, women are responsible for collecting firewood and are the most exposed to indoor air pollution during meal preparation. Once again, the findings highlight the central role of women in driving a shift in perspective that can guide societies towards less polluting cooking systems.