According to the latest 2023 SDG7 Tracking Report some 2.3 billion people globally still cook using traditional polluting fuels and technologies. In fact, the ESMAP 2020 report The State of Access to Modern Energy Cooking Services (our emphasis) identified 4 billion as not having access to modern energy cooking (higher tier stoves that have such low household air pollution that they don’t affect health). While black carbon emissions dissipate quickly, their impacts are far-reaching.
The WHO estimates that premature deaths from indoor air pollution total nearly 3.2 million annually, including about 237,000 children under the age of five who are more prone to pneumonia due to smoke exposure. In addition, annually a gigaton of CO2 emissions comes from burning non-renewable biomass fuels for cooking (about 2 per cent of the global total and equivalent to the amount produced by the aviation sector), whilst the burning of residential solid fuels comprises 58 per cent of global black carbon emissions. As household smoke is therefore both an agent of climate change and air pollution, substantial scale up of electric cooking solutions will have a major impact in both global and domestic settings.
GeCCo’s initial target is to enable a mass transition into eCooking in at least 10 countries in SSA, Asia, & LAC in 7 years, where electricity increasingly becomes the cooking fuel of choice for a significant (>10%) proportion of households and institutions.
Credit: ESMAP, 2020