Global climate change mitigation and development goals cannot be achieved without changing the way people cook and prepare their food, a report from the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) finds.

The report, Accelerating Clean Cooking as a Nature-Based Climate Solution  (36 pages, PDF), examines how cooking with wood and other high carbon-producing fuels, especially in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, remains an overlooked source of global carbon emissions, forest degradation, and preventable illness among women and children in developing countries. Lack of access to clean cooking is a major threat to the environment, climate, and sustainable livelihoods with an estimated annual global cost of $2.4 trillion, driven by the adverse impacts on health, quality of life, and gender equality, contributing to 3.2 million premature deaths annually. Cooking with solid fuels produces as much climate-harming emissions as the airline industry and produces more than half of human-generated emissions of black carbon, which is 1,500 times more impactful on global warming than carbon dioxide.

The report from CCA—a global initiative hosted by the United Nations Foundation—calls for a rapid shift to clean cooking as part of a nature-based solution to help protect, sustainably manage, and restore ecosystems to address the challenges of climate change. The report makes specific recommendations for governments, investors, corporations, and NGOs such as integrating clean cooking into how countries calculate their greenhouse gas emissions, leveraging public and private financing—and reducing investor risk—to accelerate adoption of clean cooking, targeting communities that practice unsustainable fuelwood harvesting practices, developing partnerships with stakeholders across food and cooking value chains to facilitate adoption, and creating guidelines to help corporations comply with global standards.

“There is an intrinsic connection between advancing clean cooking and mitigating climate change,” said Jillene Connors, CCA chief of staff and chief external affairs officer. “Clean cooking is one of the most important, cost-effective tools we have to reduce carbon emissions, improve public health, and conserve the environment. It’s time we invest in clean cooking as a nature-based climate solution.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/poco bw)