Reducing Behavioural Barriers to the Sustained Use of Clean Cooking Technologies in Rwanda

在家中使用生物质燃料做饭会造成严重的呼吸和环境危害。事实上，世界卫生组织将与室内空气污染（IAP）相关的疾病列为世界上最主要的环境死亡原因，每年造成约430万人死亡。传统的烹饪火也会造成严重的环境破坏，将二氧化碳、甲烷和黑碳等气体释放到大气中，从而导致温室气体排放。此外，它们对生物质燃料的需求会影响当地生态系统，因为不可持续的采伐会导致当地森林退化和农业用地生产力下降（Mobarak et al, 2012）。由于清洁炉灶技术既能带来环境效益，又能带来重大的健康效益，近年来已拨出大量资源用于推广这些技术。因此，它们甚至成为备受瞩目的发展项目的焦点，比如希拉里•克林顿（Hillary Clinton）在2010年发起的全球清洁炉灶联盟（Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves）（该联盟推动到2020年让1亿户家庭拥有炉灶）。尽管如此，在发展中国家，使用效率低下的传统炉灶仍然极为普遍。75%的南亚人仍在使用这些炉灶，撒哈拉以南非洲82%的家庭使用固体燃料做饭（健康影响研究所，2004年；Kammila等人，2014年）。即使在节能炉灶采用率相对较高的情况下，似乎拥有这些炉灶并不总是足以促进其持续使用。在我的博士研究中，我将对发展中国家持续使用节能技术的障碍的现有知识做出贡献。具体来说，我将考虑撒哈拉以南非洲地区使用清洁炉灶的瓶颈问题——在卢旺达设计并实施一项随机对照试验，对象是目前使用这种炉灶的人。该研究将评估在初始技术采用率较高的情况下，促进持续使用这些技术的不同干预措施的相对有效性。

The use of biomass fuel for cooking in the home can cause significant respiratory and environmental harm. Indeed, the World Health Organisation lists illness relating to indoor air pollution (IAP) as the top environmental cause of death in the world, responsible for around 4.3 million deaths a year. Traditional cooking fires can also cause substantial environmental damage, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions by releasing gases such as CO2, methane and black carbon into the atmosphere. Furthermore, their need for biomass fuel affects local ecosystems, as unsustainable harvesting can lead to the degradation of local forests and reduced productivity of agricultural lands (Mobarak et al, 2012).Since clean cook stove technologies can offer both environmental and significant health gains, substantial resources have been allocated to the diffusion of these in recent years. As a result, they have even been the focus of high-profile development projects, such as Hillary Clinton's 2010 Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (which pushed for stove ownership of 100 million households by 2020). Despite this, the use of inefficient, traditional cookstoves remains extremely prevalent in the developing world. 75% of South Asians use these stoves still and 82% of households in Sub Saharan Africa burn solid fuels for cooking (Health Effects Institute, 2004; Kammila et al, 2014). Even in contexts where the adoption of energy efficient cookstoves is relatively high, it seems that ownership of these stoves is not always sufficient to promote their sustained use.In my PhD studies, I will contribute to the existing knowledge on barriers to the sustained use of energy efficient technologies in the developing world. Specifically, I will consider bottlenecks to the use of clean cookstoves in Sub-Saharan Africa - designing and implementing a randomised controlled trial in Rwanda amongst current owners of such stoves. The study will assess the relative effectiveness of different interventions to promote sustained use of these technologies, in a context where initial technology adoption is high.