Stoves can help save the planet

Svati Bhogle, Managing Director, Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (TIDE), India

So far India’s media coverage on Copenhagen is all about dissent, discontent and dissonance when it should be about collective resolve and action on climate change.

Copenhagen is about reducing emissions globally but it is also about equitable and efficient use of energy. We require more sustainable use of energy as opposed to today’s abuse in the developed world and misuse in the developing world.

Two billion people - mostly in the developing world – still depend on traditional fuels like wood and charcoal for their cooking and heating. Each day they consume something like 1.2 million tons of biomass for cooking. With fuel efficient stoves these families can cut their energy use in half. They can also avoid the terrible toll of black smoke from inefficient stoves that literally choke the lives of so many women and children.

My organisation, TIDE helps some of the eight million small businesses in South India by providing improved woodstoves and kilns that burn biomass more efficiently and save at least 30 percent of fuel. We're saving well over 40,000 tonnes of wood each year and giving more than 150,000 workers a better, healthier and safer environment to work in as a result.

So let’s hope the leaders at Copenhagen will get behind simple and affordable solutions like these and steer away from the gloom and doom that can paralyze people from acting. We have the opportunity to make life cleaner, healthier and better for billions in the developing world – and at the same time improve our chances of tackling climate change.

Read more Voices on Copenhagen

TIDE received the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy’s “Energy Champion” award in 2008. TIDE develops woodstoves and kilns for small businesses across Southern India to burn biomass fuel more efficiently.

View the Ashden Awards video of TIDE:

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Coverage of our event at Intelligence Squared

Treehugger.com has reported on the Intelligence Squared event we were involved with on 25th January:

"Can Asia go green? (and if it doesn't has the world had it?)" was a fascinating discussion amongst four women (finally!) from Asian countries. Malini Mehra, from India, Christine Loh, from Hong Kong (a Time magazine Hero of the Environment), Svati Bhogle, Indian and winner of an Ashden Award for Sustainability and Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue each examined their respective country's status and future.

Svati, pictured below with Ben Dixon of the Ashden Awards, won the Energy Champion award in 2008 for her work with wood stoves for businesses in India.
We had several displays set up for the event, including scale models of some of the technology used by our international winners:and the infamous "energy bike" from Global Action Plan (a 2008 UK winner):

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Svati Bhogle interviewed by Energia

Svati Bhogle, of TIDE, won the Energy Champion Ashden Award in 2008 for TIDE's work with biomass stoves. She has recently been interviewed by Energia for the Asian Gender and Energy Network Newsletter, and when asked about the future of the stoves she said:

We have demonstrated that stoves have been accepted by end-users, which has significantly reduced firewood consumption and created profit for entrepreneurs and end users. However, we estimate that so far we have reached out to just about 5% of the potential users of our stoves. The future direction for us is to reach out to a large percentage of potential users. We need to develop dissemination strategies that are market-driven and focused on achieving scale. This involves new activities in product design so that stoves are made in production centres either installed or assembled on site, in market development and removing financial barriers that would inhibit the adoption of stoves in large quantity.

You can read the full article on page 7 of the newsletter, which can be downloaded here.

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Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change

The Ashden Awards are partners for the Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change taking place on Sunday January 25th at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Click on the link below to register and use the promotion code ‘Friend’ to get 20 percent off tickets http://www.iq2greenfestival.com

Svati Bhogle, director of TIDE in India, who won the 2008 Ashden Energy Champion award for their work on biomass stoves, will speak, and you can visit the Ashden Award display of low-carbon technology from developing countries.

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