Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

This initiative's core strategy is collaboration. The Alliance works with public, private, and non-profit partners to overcome the market barriers that hamper the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves in the developing world. It will work to develop standards for cleaner stoves, increase public and policymaker awareness of the health and environmental benefits of improved stoves, support health and climate research, and reduce trade barriers to help support market-based solutions and develop a robust clean cookstove industry.

One of the Alliance's communication-related strategic areas is advocacy - raising awareness of the benefits of clean cookstoves and advocating for their inclusion on public health, gender, energy access, and climate action agendas. Activities to support this and other strategic thrusts include:

• "Map out a baseline of current activities, identifying key gaps and constraints in the field, and formulate a research road map for each sector;
• Build the critical stoves policy and testing architecture (e.g., indoor air quality guidelines, global voluntary stove standards, lab/field stove testing, and review of global tax and tariff barriers);
• Develop innovative financing mechanisms (e.g., revolving load funds, distribution chain development strategy, and inclusive financing strategies);
• Support capacity building for stove production and marketing, including working with women's collectives and NGOs [non-governmental organisations];
• Engage political leaders in securing support for policies that bolster broader cultural acceptance for clean cookstoves; and
• Raise awareness through the design and execution of a global communications and advocacy strategy, raise visibility of the issue at high-level venues, support the 2011 PCIA Biennial Forum, review and improve user-aimed awareness campaigns in the field, and engage the UN system in a more coordinated fashion."

The above strategy is being carried out by the Alliance's Working Groups on the following topics: Health, Climate Research, Standards and Testing, Technology and Fuels, Finance and Investment, Carbon Finance, Reaching Consumers, Humanitarian, and Monitoring and Evaluation, as well as two cross-cutting committees on Gender and Manufacturing issues. Each Working Group is co-chaired by two leaders in the cookstoves field and populated with experts from the cookstoves sector or related areas. The groups will each identify and prioritise necessary steps for the sector to move forward, with the final Working Group documents serving as a sector-wide roadmap. The goal of the report is to inform donors and policymakers regarding the steps and resources needed to catalyse the clean cookstoves field.

Health, Environment, Natural Resource Management.

The Alliance's founding partners have set a goal of enabling an additional 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.

Organisers explain: "Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires - the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world - causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Cookstove smoke contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood pneumonia, emphysema, cataracts, lung cancer, bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. The World Health Organization estimates harmful cookstove smoke to be one of the top five threats to public health in poor, developing countries."