SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Charter Life are passionate about helping the world to become a better place to live. We care about the health of our natural environment, and appreciate our responsibilities towards managing our natural resources. We stand for progression and from the health of our environment to poverty reduction, we are committed to helping businesses, NGO’s and nation states to fulfil the UN’s 17 primary sustainable development goals. Our goal stands at the very core of the concept of sustainable development – we aim to facilitate a model of development so our resources can meet the needs of our current generation whilst not negatively impacting the ability to meet the needs of future generations.
OPEN FIRE COOKING
What is a three stone, open fire cookstove?
It is a surprise to many, but for over two billion people, cooking is a life-threatening activity. Nearly a third of the world’s population, are cooking their meals on a traditional, three stone, open fire cookstove, bearing a number of critical human and environmental health consequences.
A traditional open fire cookstove typically consists of three stones where a cooking pot can be placed on, with a fire underneath to do the cooking. These open fires need to be fuelled by things like kerosene, coal and biomass (forest wood, crop waste and animal dung).
THE PROBLEM
The fuel sources used in open fire cooking are inefficient whilst emitting highly toxic smoke during the cooking process. This toxic smoke is the cause of over three million premature deaths every year, making cooking for over two billion people a life-threatening activity. The World Health Organization state that open fire cooking represents one of the top-5 biggest public health risks in the world, yet it receives little attention for the magnitude of the issue. Exposure to the toxic smoke is a leading cause for diseases including childhood pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, ischemic heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.
In addition to this, as wood is often a primary fuel source, women have to spend many hours walking long distances to collect fire wood for their meals. Not only is collecting and carry lots of heavy wood an intensive labour job, it is also very time consuming. With many hours spent collecting wood, woman are losing valuable time to work or study, while children also lose valuable school time as well. Plus, chopping down trees for simple fire wood is a pretty unsustainable practice, especially with deforestation being such a key environmental threat.
WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?
Open fire cooking occurs in developing countries throughout the world, from South to Central America, and from Africa to South-East Asia. However, countries across sub-Saharan Africa are the greatest affected region, where nearly four in five people are exposed to resulting household air pollution, with woman and children under the age of five being the greatest victims.
THE SOLUTION
Martina Otto, Head of Secretariat of the United Nations Environmental Program for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, notes that; “The good news is that cleaner cooking technology is plentiful, relatively inexpensive, and already helping to save lives. The challenge now is to get this technology into the hands of more people.”
Despite the fact that cleaner cooking solutions are so available and easy to implement, pollution attributed to inefficient cooking methods is still the most under-invested health and environmental problem in the world. Through offsetting our carbon emissions, we can help to fund the distribution of cleaner, more energy efficient cookstoves to reach more families who need them, and to help make cooking being a life-threatening activity a thing of the past.
OUR MISSION
We strongly support the UN’s goal towards reducing the number of people who have to cook on open fire cookstoves, and to provide as many families as we can with the means to be able to cook without it being a life-threatening activity. Through starting with offsetting our own emissions, we aim to spread awareness of this problem, and to support NGO’s and other private organisations who are running proactive initiatives that combat this avoidable disaster, something that should never be happening in the 21st century. We want to help make open fire cooking a thing of the past, to empower women and to help children get the chance they deserve to have a better education and more time to play and just be children.
Further Understanding
If you would like to conduct further research into this topic, we recommend you to visit some of the following sites: