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Helping the Inter-American Development Bank reduce forest loss and health risks in rural Honduras

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Traditional cookstove in use
María Del Carmen Matute Chavarría using 
traditional cookstove in her home in Honduras 
Credit: Sonia García  

In many countries, people still rely on open fire, wood-fueled cook stoves to prepare their meals. This cooking often takes place indoors without sufficient ventilation. According to the Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves (http://cleancookstoves.org/country-profiles/103-honduras.html), more than 50% of the households in Honduras use these traditional stoves. The smoke pollutes the air inside these homes, increasing the risk of tuberculosis and other health issues.* In addition, cutting and using forest products to fuel these cook stoves contributes to the degradation of Honduras’ forests and is often part of a causal chain leading to deforestation. Honduras has an alarmingly high rate of forest loss—2.5 % per year.

Now, thanks to the PROFOGONES Project, jointly funded by Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the government of Honduras, Fundación Vida, and Climate Investment Fund, open fire cook stoves in Honduras are being replaced with more efficient ‘ecostoves.’ The new stoves use only half as much wood fuel as traditional stoves, and enable faster cooking. They emit much less smoke, improving indoor air quality and reducing the risk of related health issues. And the pressure on forests is significantly reduced.

Despite these benefits, funding for the improved cook stoves project is only sufficient to service 50,000 households, so project managers need to make hard decisions about which villages to target for assistance. As a member of the SERVIR Applied Sciences Team, Allen Blackman** and his colleagues at Resources for the Future have developed a tool that uses Landsat and other satellite data to make those decisions easier.

“It’s essential to target households where new stoves will be most beneficial,” he says. “A modified version of our Forest Conservation Targeting Tool (FCTT) is helping the Ecostoves Project identify locations within Honduras where they are likely to have the greatest bang-for-the-buck.”

The generic version of the FCTT*** helps decision-makers estimate and visualize returns expected from protecting specific forested regions and, based on that information, target the best areas for conservation. The targeting criteria are deforestation risk (estimated using Landsat and other satellite data); conservation costs; and three forest ecosystem services—carbon storage, provision of biodiversity habitat, and provision of hydrological services—which users can weight as they please. However, the selection criteria can be modified to those relevant for a specific project’s objectives.

A new ecostove in a home in Honduras
Blanca Estela Andino Silva uses new Ecostove in her home in Honduras 
Credit: Marvin López Torres  

“For the cook stoves project, we want to give priority to communities with a combination of high population density, high levels of poverty, and areas with high risks for deforestation,” explains IADB PROFOGONES Senior Technical Advisor Rogerio Miranda.

Blackman and his colleagues have modified the tool’s targeting criteria accordingly. Also at the request of the Ecostoves Project, they use Aldeas—Honduras’ third-level administrative units, roughly the equivalent of townships in the US—as spatial units of analysis. There are more than 3,700 Aldeas in Honduras, so this feature enables project administrators to target at a fine spatial and demographic scale.

Miranda notes that, as a result of these modifications, “The FCTT tool should help our partners identify the families or households that are most in need for ecostoves, and therefore more likely to benefit.”

They stand to benefit the most, he says, because “they are in areas of likely fuelwood scarcity … and they are among the poorest, so spending more money or time to obtain fuelwood will drain more scarce family resources (money or time) that could be used for other family priorities.”

And the targeted areas should see the most “bang for the buck” in other ways.

“Since ecostoves are thought to reduce fuelwood consumption by about half, promoting ecostoves in areas of high deforestation risk will help alleviate the pressure on surrounding natural forest and therefore diminish the risk for deforestation.”

Miranda even has ideas for further uses of the FCTT.

“In the near future [the cook stoves project] will embark on carbon financing, and therefore data on deforestation risk will be even more relevant.  Also carbon financing schemes are to include social health impacts in the near future, so if respiratory diseases data can be included in the FCTT, it will help to better target communities with high incidences of these diseases.”

The Ecostoves Project is just getting started. Project managers are already using the FCTT to target the best locations. Then they’ll begin distributing the new stoves.

 “It is great to see how satellite information can be applied to better design and implement projects in territories that are difficult to access,” says Miranda.

Screenshot from Forest Conservation Targeting Tool
The Forest Conservation Targeting Tool identifies townships in Honduras (highlighted in yellow) 
where disseminating improved cook stoves is likely to have the greatest ‘bang-for-the-buck.’

Notes

* The World Health Organization (2013) identifies the use of solid fuels as one of the key preventable risk factors associated with increased mortality and morbidity.

**Blackman is an economist and Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit, nonpartisan environmental policy research institute.

***The FCTT is scheduled to be publicly launched in the summer of 2016.