Page 21 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

for remediation. He provided my second major reading assignment during that first month in EAP/RSP, starting with the review article by Ramanathan and Carmichael on “Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon”,19 an analy- sis of an atmospheric phenomenon known as the “Asian Brown Cloud” and its consequences.
Biomass burning cook stoves, indoor air pollution, and health
Before taking this story any further, I must comment on the importance of the revolution in research that has been enabled by the instant access to information provided by the internet. Fortunately, I do not have to imagine how I could have familiarized myself with these issues, all quite far from my areas of expertise, if I did not have State Department and Penn State University on-line journal access and if all of the government and non-governmental organization reports were not available in electronic form on-line. It certainly lev- els the playing field for scientists and engineers entering pol- icy arenas that are dominated by those who specialize in international relations.
When I started my investigation into the sources of black carbon (soot), the commonly accepted understanding of the ratio of atmospheric black carbon due to biomass burning, primarily from cooking, vs. other sources (e.g., diesel exhaust), was about 50/50. An excellent subsequent study used neutron-activation analysis to demonstrate that 75% of Asian atmospheric black carbon was due to biomass burn- ing20 that includes cooking as well as forest fires (both natural and man-made). The World Health Organization (WHO) cataloged the percentage of the population that used solid
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problem.
The good news is that the atmospheric lifetime of black
carbon is only about ten days. That means that if it is not gen- erated, then the significant contribution of soot to global
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Reduction in the production of CO2 will not reduce temperature on multi-cen- tury timescales, but only reduce its rate of increase—most of what is already in the atmosphere stays there essentially for- ever. Other non-CO2 climate forcers have lifetimes that are also significantly longer than black carbon: CH4 (12±3 years),
N2O (114 years), CFC-12 (100 years), HCFC-22 (12 years). WHO data also demonstrated that biomass soot was not just an issue that impacted global climate change, but also was a public health problem with a magnitude that was com- parable to HIV/AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, and disease related to availability of clean drinking water or lack of sani- tation. The WHO ranks harmful cook stove smoke as the fourth worst overall health risk factor in developing coun-
tries. Estimates put smoke inhalation as the cause of 1.9 mil- lion premature deaths annually, with women and young chil- dren the most directly affected. Inefficient cook stoves increase the risk of acute respiratory tract infections in chil- dren younger than five years and chronic respiratory and heart disease in adults older than 30 years. Globally, almost 1 million children are currently dying every year of respiratory infections induced or exacerbated by the inefficient burning of solid fuels.25 Cook stove smoke also contributes to a range of chronic illnesses and acute health impacts such as early childhood pneumonia, emphysema, cataracts, lung cancer,
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camps and in conflict zones.
This combination of global climate effects, local health
consequences, deforestation, and violence against women suggests that a rather large constituency could be built to support a policy that would encourage the development and large-scale deployment of improved cook stoves. It seemed that the technological challenges to the design of clean-burn- ing cook stoves could be addressed scientifically, and some such efforts were already underway, but the scale required to make a significant impact is truly daunting. Three billion
fuels in each country.
By contrast, the atmospher- ic lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 is complicated (the sum of terms with different time constants23), but the long-time tail
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warming stops rather abruptly.
is probably about 30,000 to 35,000 years.
bronchitis, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight. Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating also increases pressures on local natural resources (e.g., forests, habitat) and forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting wood. Women and girls also face severe personal security risks as they forage for fuel from refugee
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Like the U.S., solid fuels were used by less than 5% of the population of Singapore and Malaysia, but nearly half of Filipinos cooked with solid fuels, over 70% of Thais, Indonesians, and Vietnamese, while Lao PDR, Cambodia and Burma were all over 95% biomass burners. Clearly, this was an ASEAN problem and that made it my
Cook Stoves and Climate Change 17