Up in Smoke
In the vibrant tribal communities of India’s Eastern Ghats, the houses echo their natural environment. Households paint each room a different color; one room reflects the green of the forested surroundings, another, the stunning orange of a tiger. But not the kitchen. Each kitchen is a startling black. Years of smoke and soot have obscured the once brightly colored walls. This soot comes from the family’s traditional cookstove, used for performing necessary household duties like cooking and heating water. As traditional cookstoves pose major health and environmental risks, researchers have been attempting to design improved cookstoves for decades. However, in the Eastern Ghats, this new technology requires communities to sacrifice thousands of years of culture and tradition. They do not consider it an improvement.
Today, almost half of the world’s population relies on burning biomass to cook, using rudimentary cookstoves or open fires indoors. Globally, the household air pollution from these cookstoves kills over four million people each year and causes serious harm or illness to millions more. Some of the most disastrous impacts occur in India, where more than 800 million of India’s citizens are impacted by exposure to household air pollution. Compounding public health concerns are cookstoves’ severe impact on the environment. In rural parts of India, wood is the only cheap source of fuel. However, collection of fuelwood from surrounding forests leads to drastic deforestation in the region. Furthermore, the black carbon emitted from cookstoves alters atmospheric patterns, weakens monsoons, which are essential for agriculture, and contributes to warming in the arctic; scientists estimate black carbon is the second leading cause of climate change behind carbon dioxide.
The health and environmental impacts of cookstoves have been well documented in India. In order to address these problems, most organizations, including The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and the Indian government, are pushing the transition from traditional cookstoves that burn bioenergy to improved cookstoves that use cleaner, more efficient fuels. Yet, surprisingly little research has examined the effects of these efforts. I partnered with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), an Indian non-profit, to assess the efficacy of clean cooking initiatives for tribal communities in southern India. Our central question: are the “improved” cookstoves working for the communities using them or is there a better suited alternative?
Tucked away in a remote, southern region of the Eastern Ghats is the Male Mahadeshwara (M.M.) Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. The isolated, tribal villages of M.M. Hills exemplify the types of communities improved cookstove programs initially aimed to help, but were thereafter forgotten. M.M. Hills Wildlife Sanctuary is home to just over thirty villages, which are primarily made up of the Soliga and Lingayat tribes. There is a close link between the human communities of M.M. Hills and the natural ones as the communities are primarily made up of subsistence farmers. The wildlife sanctuary is extremely rich in biodiversity, but is subject to accelerating degradation due to strong demands on the forest from fuelwood extraction and agricultural practices. As a result, the Indian government has implemented targeted efforts to mitigate biofuel use in this area. These efforts include banning fuelwood collection in parts of the forest in addition to subsidizing the purchase of liquified petroleum gas (LPG) stoves and refills of LPG fuel cylinders. However, the government has failed to conduct any assessment on the efficacy of these initiatives.
We designed a study to decipher the current energy profile of rural households and evaluate whether the introduction of improved cookstoves has indeed resulted in positive effects on health outcomes, the reduction of biofuel use, and mitigating deforestation. As expected, due to the recent push by the Indian government, 85% of the households in M.M. Hills owned an LPG stove. However, most homes had stowed the shiny new stove in a dusty corner or on a top shelf. In fact, only 10% of households interviewed used the LPG stove as their primary stove for cooking. For the majority of households that did use the LPG stove, it was solely used to make tea. Many people interviewed noted that food made with an LPG stove did not taste good. Stunning statements by local residents also revealed that they cannot cook staple foods such as ragi and millet balls on LPG stoves. Millet is one of the primary subsistence crops grown by farmers in the region and is the foundation of the local diet. Initiatives in the region were designed to provide families a new stove to cook with, yet even traditional staple foods eaten widely across India cannot be cooked on these stoves. These initiatives were doomed from the start.
Further compounding this problem is that the primary purpose for burning biofuel in this region of India isn’t cooking. Households, even those that are dedicated users of their LPG stoves, still exclusively use fuelwood to boil large quantities of water, which has to be done several times daily. Importantly, the findings from this study show that boiling water requires more fuelwood than cooking on a weekly basis. An even larger demand for fuelwood comes in the winter months during which farmers burn campfires throughout the night in order to protect their crops from wildlife. Improved cookstoves are not suitable for this purpose either. These factors indicate that programs to reduce fuelwood consumption and the resulting pollution in the area should not focus singularly on cookstoves, as other uses of fuelwood represent the majority of the problem.
Considering these factors, it is unsurprising that this study did not find evidence that clean cookstove initiatives meaningfully improved health or environmental outcomes in M.M. Hills. Since most households do not use their LPG stove, the stove’s introduction cannot have reduced the magnitude of air pollution experienced by these households. In a majority of households that do routinely use their LPG stove, family members still report experiencing negative health symptoms while they burn fuelwood for purposes other than cooking, which again constitutes the majority of fuelwood consumption. In fact, on average, we found that households that do use an LPG stove for cooking consume about the same amount of fuelwood as households that never use an LPG stove. Therefore, it is unlikely that the use of improved cookstoves significantly lessens exposure to dangerous pollutants. What’s more, nearly a third of households reported negative health symptoms such as nausea while using LPG stoves.
While the findings above are disheartening, we discovered a possible path forward. Lantana camara. Lantana camara originates in Central and South America and is one of the world’s most invasive weeds. It was first introduced into India in 1809 as an ornamental shrub and rapidly took over. The invasion of lantana camara has drastically altered the forest ecosystem in India. Lantana crowds out native plant species, stalls the regeneration of native forest plants, and reduces wild animals’ access to forage, all contributing to the drastic decline of biodiversity in the region. Scientists consider lantana to be one of the main threats to India’s forests, not far behind deforestation. Unfortunately, lantana eradication is expensive and has proven to be ineffective; it grows back almost as soon as it is removed. Since lantana now dominates much of India’s wild landscape, we paid particular attention to how its takeover has changed practices around fuelwood collection and cookstove use. Until now, few studies have examined lantana camara’s potential as a fuelwood and it was unknown whether rural villages were burning lantana and if so, how much.
To our surprise, over ninety percent of households interviewed were already burning lantana camara, and lantana was, in many cases, their main source of fuel. This was out of necessity rather than choice. The community emphasized that the composition of the forest had changed drastically over the past decade; far fewer timber trees, which are preferable for burning, exist now and in order to reach them, one would typically have to walk several kilometers. Routinely walking several kilometers with 40 pounds of wood balanced overhead was a difficult feat and was not sustainable for most households. Lantana camara was the only source of wood nearby, but it was merely a scraggly bush. As lantana pushed out native species, households were forced to collect it in order to meet the high demand for fuel that could not be fulfilled by scarce timber species alone.
Tragically, it was also lantana that caused the most severe health symptoms. Over ninety percent of households reported experiencing symptoms such as eye irritation, headaches, chest pain, and nausea, while cooking or burning fuelwood. Smoke from lantana was the main culprit. Seventy percent of households expressed that only lantana smoke caused these symptoms, while burning other fuel species did not lead to any symptoms at all. This is likely due to the fact that lantana releases more smoke than other fuelwoods and burns inefficiently in comparison to timber fuel. Studies have not yet determined the long-term health impacts of lantana smoke, but the sharp increase in the severity and prevalence of short-term symptoms with increased lantana use evidences that long-term health outcomes have also worsened. As long as lantana continues to spread, households will likely grow increasingly sick.
Although lantana’s dominance is the root cause of the M.M. Hills community’s worsening symptoms, there may be an opportunity to capitalize on its widespread availability so that lantana can start working for, rather than against, the community. Preliminary studies have shown that lantana can successfully be converted into clean energy fuel briquettes, an alternative source of renewable energy. These briquettes are smokeless with low ash content, key characteristics in alleviating both the short and long-term health consequences of burning fuelwood. What’s more, briquetting provides the opportunity to convert the harmful and environmentally costly invasive weed species into value-added material. Native tree species would no longer be needed for fuel, which would allow the forest to begin to recover. However, the crucial difference between lantana briquettes and other clean fuels is that these briquettes would allow households to cook their traditional foods - an act that is an innate right for any community. In comparison to improved cookstoves, lantana presents a promising alternative that addresses many of the complex, interwoven issues of cookstove usage, while taking local needs, circumstances, and custom into account.
Lantana is by no means a miracle cure for a catastrophe that has been centuries in the making. It is not endlessly renewable, like wind or solar power, and still requires the introduction of technology such as kilns to extremely remote areas. There is no guarantee that households would adopt lantana briquettes any more successfully than they did LPG stoves. However, lantana briquettes illustrate that there are rather obvious localized alternatives to the mass introduction of “improved” cookstoves that have been imposed on vastly different communities across the globe. Ironically, cookstove adoption and compatibility with local practices, the factors in the long process of improved cookstove development and introduction that seem to be the least researched, are shown by this study to also be the most important. For, as effective and clean as these new stoves may be in theory, they will have no impact whatsoever if people aren’t using them. Communities, no matter how small, should have more input on the future of their most basic necessity, food. It is these communities who should dictate how technologies are introduced and integrated into their life. There can be no one size fits all solution that works for the extremely diverse, millennia old cultures that continue to use cookstoves to this day. The improved LPG cookstoves are certainly not a solution that is working in the Eastern Ghats of India.
