China's clean stoves initiative signals its green commitment

Despite mounting criticism as the world's largest polluting nation, China has implemented the most successful programme to adopt clean and safe cooking solutions for households, to improve people's livelihoods and ultimately reduce emissions.

This proves Beijing can boost its economic growth, develop energy security and reduce pollution at the same time. Notwithstanding its current pollution levels, it should be remembered that China is also the largest investor in green energy.

Emblematic of Beijing's environmental leaps, it announced a historic deal with the US to rein back greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 at the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

Promoting the use of clean cooking stoves is an under-reported, albeit critical, area in environment and health. Lung cancer is the fourth biggest killer in the world, ahead of Aids. Traditional stoves produce the same amount of smoke as 400 cigarettes in one hour.

By coming to grips with this issue, China has vowed to be a clean power and lead the way. It has grasped the detrimental consequences of rapid industrialisation on health and the environment.

Traditional stoves - coined "silent killers" - contribute to household air pollution, which causes the death of more than one million people every year in China, according to statistics from the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Some 608 million Chinese suffer from household air pollution as they rely on solid fuels, namely coal, wood, crop residues and animal dung for cooking and heating.

Between 1982 and 1992, Beijing successfully distributed 180 million improved stoves to households, thanks to its national programme, Wang Yanliang, director general of the Rural Energy and Environment Agency of the Ministry of Agriculture told the Cookstoves Future Summit in New York last week.