Uptake of energy efficient cookstoves in Pakistan
Introduction
Many developing countries, including Pakistan, face two crucial and interrelated problems in the rural energy sector: the highly uneven distribution and use of modern energy sources and the widespread inefficient production and use of traditional energy sources. The former raises important issues of economics, equity, and quality of life and the latter poses economic, environmental, and health threats [[1], [2], [3]]. Although there have been remarkable developments in energy technologies in the past few decades with many countries moving up the energy ladder towards use of clean fuels [4], a large proportion of the world's population still depends on biomass fuels for cooking and heating [5,6]. To date, roughly 3 billion people worldwide cook and heat homes using stoves fueled by biomass [[7], [8], [9], [10], [11]]. Excessive household dependence on biomass fuels, however, exacerbates demand for such fuels due to inefficient burning whilst also carrying serious environmental and health implications [[12], [13], [14]].
The level of household air pollution, particularly particulate matter (PM2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO), in households using solid biomass fuels and polluting stoves is much higher than the safe levels of air quality standards (AQS) as fixed by WHO [1,15]. Exposure to household air pollution leads to a number of diseases as well as mortality worldwide. Among the diseases associated with household air pollution are chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, pneumonia, acute lower respiratory diseases, disability in children, and eye disease [[16], [17], [18], [19], [20]]. According to WHO [8], each year, about 4 million premature deaths, with half of them among children under 5 years of age, are attributed to household air pollution. The burden of disease and mortality falls disproportionately on the poor, particularly on women and children, in the developing countries [21,22].
Developing countries have addressed the environmental and health issues arising from polluting stoves through large scale dissemination of energy efficient cookstoves (EECs) [[23], [24], [25], [26]]. EECs are defined as stoves having higher thermal efficiency, which therefore consume less fuel in comparison with polluting stoves [[27], [28], [29]]. The EEC programs commenced worldwide in the 1970s with more than 160 ongoing programs [30]. Countries around the world have launched different types of subsidy and support programs to effectively promote the uptake of EECs [23,[31], [32], [33]]. However, the dissemination of the stoves has not run smoothly since its inception due to the discouraging response from local communities [[34], [35], [36]]. The low rate of uptake of these stoves can be attributed not only to the income of the household or cost of the stove but a number of other factors which can be classified as socio-cultural, economic, and contextual. This study investigates the individual, household, and community level determinants that influence the uptake of the EECs in Chitral, Pakistan.
The study contributes to the existing scholarship on EECs as follows. First, where previous studies on cookstove adoption focused primarily on socio-economic and cultural factors, the findings of this study underscore the importance of information and promotion in the cookstove diffusion process in addition to socio-economic and cultural factors. This aspect has been rarely explored in previous studies. Second, a growing body of the current literature models household uptake behavior as a dichotomous (dummy) variable. But in communities where EEC dissemination programs are working, different versions of EECs are available. In Chitral, Pakistan, for instance, three different types of cookstoves dominate the kitchens: traditional cookstove, energy efficient local cookstove (local EECs), and energy efficient project cookstove (project EECs). The uptake of various versions of the stove thus depends on household preference and the determinants of their choice are different from one type of EEC to another. This study deviates from previous studies by taking into account the different types of ECCs in the analysis. It considers the locally manufactured EECs as a different category from the project EECs and uses an ordinal logit model to identify the determinants of the uptake of various versions of the stove. To date, only a few studies, though none in Pakistan, have considered the uptake of different types of cookstoves in ordinal form. The study is distinguished thus by the adoption of an appropriate and novel analytical approach to capture the choices of households with regard to EECs.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, a brief review of the current literature on the uptake of EECs and their socio-economic benefits is given. Section 3 outlines the methodology used in conducting the study. Section 4 provides a detailed discussion of the results of the study. Section 5 gives the conclusions and recommendations based on the findings of the study.
Section snippets
Literature review
The energy choice theory is based on the notion of ‘multiple fuels multiple choices’ [37]. In rural areas of developing countries, however, people do not have multiple choices when it comes to clean fuels. Instead, they mostly depend on traditional biomass fuels which are polluting [38]. This section briefly discusses the literature on household energy use and the uptake of EECs.
The literature indicates that biomass is a predominant cooking fuel in developing countries [39] that has a number of
Study area and data
The study is based on primary data collected via extensive field work in 2012 in the District of Chitral in northwest Pakistan. Four valleys, namely, Booni, Mastuj, Garam Chishma and Mulkhow, were selected for the survey (Fig. 1). To select the research area and to ensure inclusion of the relevant variables in the study, a questionnaire-based exploratory study was conducted before the main survey. During the exploratory study, it was found that a local NGO named Agha Khan Planning and Building
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the model. While the Table shows descriptive statistics of the overall explanatory variables that are discussed here, stove-wise descriptive statistics are also provided for purposes of comparison. As the sample is randomly selected with equal allocation between adopters and non-adopters, the Table shows that 50% of the sampled households use traditional cookstoves, 23% use local EECs, and 27% use project EECs. The average
Conclusions and recommendations
This study uses the ordered logit model to determine the factors that account for the uptake of energy efficient cookstoves (EECs) in Pakistan. The empirical results suggest that education of the household head, landholding, role of NGOs in promoting the dissemination of EECs, and information dissemination campaigns significantly influence the uptake of EECs in the area. The findings underscore the importance of socio-economic factors, nudging, and the robustness of the diffusion process in
CRediT author statement
Inayatullah Jan: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Data curation, Literature review, Discussion, Conclusion & recommendations, Referencing. Heman Das Lohano: Data curation, Analysis, Interpretation of results.
Declaration of competing interest
We, the authors, declare that we have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge funding for the study by the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Nepal. The authors are grateful to the SANDEE staff and advisors for technical and administrative support provided during a series of SANDEE bi-annual Research and Training Workshops. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which
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