Introducing Solar Cooking to the World

As we all know, we should end the practices of burning forests and clearing land for farming, for urban expansion and for road construction. Big companies are often blamed for this, but what's often overlooked is the practice of collecting wood for heating and cooking and for making charcoal, which is of particular concern in Africa, where wood provides some 70% of domestic energy.

Loss of trees leads to flooding and loss of top soil during heavy rains, and makes the land more prone to desertification, droughts, fires, insect plagues and other natural disasters.

Burning wood is also bad for our health and for the environment. It releases very fine particles of carbon into the air and those carbon particulates are directly responsible for one million deaths.

Furthermore, the practice of burning wood contributes substantially to global warming.
Smoke particles travel around the globe, landing on deserts, ice and snow, which reduces the Earth's albedo (reflectivity), resulting in more heat absorption and melting of ice, which uncovers further darker soil and in turn causes further global warming. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), between 20% and 25% of all annual global CO2 emissions are caused by the practice of burning forests and clearing land for farming.

All over Asia, Africa and Latin America, you can see women and children scrambling for wood, carrying up to 40 lbs of wood on their heads and backs. They spend many hours daily to collect and carry the wood to their homes, causing deforestation, land erosion and desertification. Estimates are that more than half the woodfires in India are associated with rural cooking.

Bob Metcalf is a professor of biological sciences at California State University Sacramento. As a volunteer for Solar Cookers International, established in 1987, Bob has helped distributing the Cookit foldable solar cooker panel around the world. Bob points out that in many developing countries, such solar cookers can be used 200-300 days a year.

Bob Metcalf further writes: "Some 2.5 billion people, over one-third of humanity, use woodfire for cooking. In 40 of the world's poorest countries, over 70% of the country's fuel comes from dwindling supplies of wood, or, in towns and cities, from charcoal that was inefficiently made from wood. Tanzania has some 32 million people and over 90% of the country's energy comes from wood/charcoal. That's about 60 million pounds of wood burned to ashes every day!"



References:
Saving Africa's forests, the 'lungs of the world' - by Michael Fleshman

The Solar Cooking Archive

The Other Carbon: Reducing Black Carbon's Role in Global Warming - Wired

The Energy Crisis on a Global Scale - by Bob Metcalf

Cookit foldable solar cooker panel