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Patterns of Stove Use in the Context of Fuel–Device Stacking: Rationale and Implications

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Abstract

The implementation of clean fuel and stove programs that achieve sustained use and tangible health, environmental, and social benefits to the target populations remains a key challenge. Realization of these benefits has proven elusive because even when the promoted fuels-stoves are used in the long term they are often combined (i.e., “stacked”) with the traditional ones to fulfill all household needs originally met with open fires. This paper reviews the rationale for stacking in terms of the roles of end uses, cooking tasks, livelihood strategies, and the main patterns of use resulting from them. It uses evidence from case studies in different countries and from a 1-year-long field study conducted in 100 homes in three villages of Central Mexico; outlining key implications for household fuel savings, energy use, and health. We argue for the implementation of portfolios of clean fuels, devices and improved practices tailored to local needs to broaden the use niches that stove programs can cover and to reduce residual open fire use. This allows to integrate stacking into diagnosis tools, program monitoring, evaluation schemes, and implementation strategies and establish critical actions that researchers and project planners can consider when faced with actual or potential fuel-device stacking.

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Notes

  1. Socioeconomic factors: income and education; socioecological factors: level of access in gathering fuel and climate conditions; technological factors: use of LPG and use of multiple fuels and stoves for cooking; cultural factors: attachment to ancestral ways of cooking and the use of traditional pots.

  2. Fuel and technology characteristics: fuel savings, impacts on time, general design requirements, durability, and other specific design requirements, fuel requirements; household and setting characteristics: socioeconomic status, education, demographics, house ownership and structure, multiple fuel and stove use, geography and climate; knowledge and perceptions: smoke, health and safety, cleanliness and home improvement, total perceived benefit, social influence, tradition and culture; financial, tax and subsidy aspects: stove costs and subsidies, payment modalities, program subsidies; market development: demand creation, supply chains, business and sales approach; regulation, legislation and standards: regulation, certification and standardization, enforcement mechanisms; programmatic and policy mechanisms: construction and installation, institutional arrangements, community involvement, creation of competition, user training, post-acquisition support, monitoring and quality control.

  3. This full switch to the cleaner combustion fuel and devices is part of the conventional energy transition theoretical model, known as the “energy ladder” (Hosier and Dowd 1987; Smith 1987). The model considers that as fractions of the population increase their income, prosperity or development, they begin “climbing” from the most traditional fuels at the bottom to the most advanced at the top. Sometimes considered the norm for residential cooking, the energy ladder model has been widely criticized for its lack of empirical evidence to support it for the case of clean cookstoves.

  4. For this activity, a house heats a small enclosure, separate from the main house using an open fire. The enclosure has a small entrance and no windows.

  5. Besides being traditional, most of these foods require fuel-intensive cooking, suggesting that economic factors also play a role in the resilience of traditional fuels.

  6. The platform allowed to obtain differential (stove–ambient) temperature signals and analyze them with peak detection routines to count cooking events and with routines to accumulate the time above temperature thresholds to determine time in use.

  7. Detailed classification by physical configuration—also necessary for standardization of SUM placement and signal analysis—revealed 14 stove phenotypes: six for traditional fires without chimney (FIRE), five for chimney stoves including the Patsari (CHM) and two for LPG stoves (GAS). Most stoves were stationary and there were no stove phenotypes exclusively dedicated to a single cooking task.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the families of La Mojonera, Taretan, and Tanimereche in Michoacán, México, for their trust, patience, and hospitality in participating in this study, and Pablo Venegas, Alejandro Tavera, Gilberto Silva, Sergio Luis Guzman, Lucy Martinez, Carolina Romero, Alonso Mendoza, Myriam Miranda, Paulo Cesar Medina and Juan Pablo Gutierrez, for their hard work, dedication and commitment to the SUMs Project. We thank Victor Berrueta and Edgar Tafoya from Grupo Interdisciplinario de Tecnología Rural Apropiada (GIRA, A. C.) and Servando Perez from AURA A. C. for insightful discussions. We thank the field and laboratory teams at the Bioenergy Lab and the Ecotechnology Unit at CIEco-UNAM, and the teams at Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica. This work was supported by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM-PAPIIT #IT101512), El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT #119143) and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves of the United Nations Foundation (UNF-12-385). Ilse Ruiz-Mercado acknowledges the support of the DGAPA-UNAM Postdoctoral Fellowship and of El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Cátedra CONACyT Proyecto #2269).

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  1. Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Antigua Carretera a Pátzcuaro #8701, Col. San José de la Huerta, 58190, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico

    Ilse Ruiz-Mercado & Omar Masera

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Correspondence to Ilse Ruiz-Mercado.

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Ruiz-Mercado, I., Masera, O. Patterns of Stove Use in the Context of Fuel–Device Stacking: Rationale and Implications. EcoHealth 12, 42–56 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-015-1009-4

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