Reliability matters: Achieving affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030 (original) (raw)

Ethanol, electric cooking, LPG where appropriate and other next generation modern energy cooking solutions offer hope to achieve better environmental and health impacts. What’s also needed to achieve SDG7 by 2030 is reliability.

Three Urgent Levers to Achieve Reliable Cooking Solutions

Getting to reliable clean cooking solutions is complex. It would be much easier to track and invest only in the distribution of those solutions. However, distribution does not in itself result in good health outcomes; sustained performance and consistent usage does. We owe it to the 2.8 billion people, we owe it to the planet, and we owe it to ourselves to go beyond just distribution into reliability which enables consistent usage.

With this, below are three recommend levers to pull:

Glocal: global meets local. Getting to sustainable energy for all is going to require a dramatic shift, where global scale meets local communities. The UN SDG7 website specifically calls this out: “governments and agencies need to work together on international climate change agreements... but this is not enough. Solutions must also be developed locally in impoverished rural areas.” Leaders living in rural areas need to have a seat at the table when it comes to designing and implementing solutions in their communities. Solutions should benefit both health and climate as well as local livelihoods.

Stop, collaborate and listen to women end users. If a woman is not using a clean cookstove or cooking fuel, take that as feedback that the solution was not appropriate for her needs rather than try to convince her to use it. We should practice results-based scale with clean cooking solutions, scaling up only when we know that women like a particular solution and consistently use it. It is crucial to understand the ground realities of day to day life for women end users and their families. Understanding this will bring us closer to finding reliable solutions.

Rapid learning and iteration. The path to accelerate progress for SDG7 is to learn fast and iterate on our solutions. The ground reality data shared in this op-ed was collected quickly because of sensors. But this data alone is not going to solve the issue of reliability. The question then becomes: how do we use tools like sensor data to solve the problems on the ground? With actionable data in hand, we believe stakeholders and country leaders can identify pathways towards more reliable solutions.

What do you think is missing from this list? We want to hear from you. Please contact secretariat [at] ccacoalition.org (secretariat[at]ccacoalition[dot]org) and communications [at] nexleaf.org (communications[at]nexleaf[dot]org )with your responses and thoughts.

The authors would like to take a moment to thank households that are actively participating as champions of climate change mitigation and taking a chance on the many clean cooking solutions that the sector continues to evaluate. Our sector has learned everything we have because of the families welcoming us into their homes, and for that we owe them the highest quality solutions possible.

Authors

Tara Ramanathan is Director of Clean Energy at Nexleaf Analytics, a nonprofit focused on amplifying the impact of life-saving solutions including the vaccine cold chain and clean cooking. With more than 10 years of experience working with vulnerable populations, Tara always remains focused on her North Star: the women who cook. She has an MBA from University of Oxford Said Business school with an entrepreneurial focus on systems change and business models to scale impactful clean cooking.

Helena Molin Valdés is the head of the secretariat for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), hosted by UN Environment Programme, focusing on scaling up actions to address the multiple benefits of emission reductions from short-lived climate pollutants, including black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone and HFCs. She is an architect by training and has been a UN executive for over 20 years in areas of disaster resilience, environment and sustainable development.

Olivia Coldrey is Lead, Energy Finance & Clean Cooking at Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), an international organization launched as an initiative by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2011, that works to drive further, faster action toward achievement of SDG7. A lawyer by training, Olivia has over 20 years experience working at the intersection of law, finance and energy markets.