Lao: Clean and Improved Cooking

Household air pollution is a leading cause of premature death in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Created when solid wood fuels are burned for cooking and heating, it has serious health, environmental, and economic impacts—especially for women. Highly efficient cookstoves and biomass pellets, like the ones promoted by Ci-Dev’s Lao PDR Clean Cookstove Initiative, offer a promising solution.

Through results-based finance, the Lao PDR Clean Cookstove Initiative aims to distribute 50,000 highly efficient cookstoves in three targeted provinces—Vientiane (capital), Savannakhet, and Champasack. In addition to making the cookstoves more affordable, carbon funds will also be used to support awareness raising campaigns that will help the local market grow. Ci-Dev will make payments for emission reductions of approximately 200,000 tons of CO2e.

The program will monitor the daily impact on women using the stoves, measuring the benefits like reduced expenditure on fuel, cooking time, and health issues related to household air pollution. This data will be used to quantify the benefits of the new cookstoves to understand the possible ways to unlock future results-based finance for clean cookstoves.

The program is an example of how carbon finance can be used to support public-private partnerships for cleaner cooking solutions that save energy, improve health, benefit women and children, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.