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Viewpoints - An interview with Professor Kirk R Smith
[top] [end]IntroductionQ1) Kirk, can you talk a bit about yourself, where you live, your work history and your involvement with household energy?Well my name is Kirk Smith and I am Professor of Global Environmental Health at the University of California, Berkeley. I started my career and worked for almost twenty years at the East-West Centre in Hawaii, a research institute that focuses on problems in Asia and the Pacific. I arrived in 1977 soon after finishing my doctoral degree and established the energy programme there. The first major research effort we undertook was on rural household energy in six Asian countries and I spent considerable time in the region getting to know the people involved, observing households and trying to understand the technologies in use. In the process of doing this I noticed that you couldn’t spend long in many rural households and not notice the heavy smoke conditions, and since I had a background in biomedical and environmental health I wondered what the pollution levels might be - and what kind of health effects might occur. I returned in 1980 and together with my students did a literature review, and we could not find evidence of anybody ever doing any measurements. So we did some ‘back of the envelope’ calculations of air pollution levels, given that we knew how big a village house was, how much wood was burned for cooking, and the emissions factors from studies of US fireplaces. We roughly estimated what the concentrations of small particles would be, which is the best indicator of ill health, and we came up with these astonishingly high levels that you could hardly believe. We couldn’t find anything wrong with our calculations and there were no other studies to reference, so I borrowed some equipment from a colleague back in Berkeley and some other colleagues in India hid the costs in another project and in early 1981 we did the first set of measurements in Gujarat in Western India. The women wore particle measuring devices as they cooked and we basically verified the concentrations that were predicted by the ‘back of the envelope’ estimates and these concentrations were orders of magnitude higher than anything that would be considered health protecting, like WHO guidelines, and at least five times greater than even the worst cities. Given that women and children in the poorest rural households are, almost by definition, the most vulnerable population in the world it seemed likely there might be health effects. So we had a small meeting at the East-West Centre in the early 1980’s to decide on what the health research agenda might be and we laid out a set of issues we should try to look at. We thought the most important was probably child pneumonia as this is the chief cause of lost life years in the world, the biggest cause of death in children, and those of course occur mostly in rural areas of developing countries. We also thought that a randomised trial, which is a sort of ‘gold standard’ type of study, would be most convincing to the international health community was the best thing to try to do. However, it then took us 17 years to get the funding and so we only started in 2001. Around 1990 there was the first major international interest in climate change issues, focussed around the Rio earth summit where the convention was signed. While the US Environmental Protection Agency was sympathetic to my health effects research, they couldn’t spend any money outside the country on health. However, when climate change became an issue the global nature of the problem meant that we could then do work on the climate implications of household combustion and at the same time do health related work. This lead to doing the first measurements in the early 90’s of what’s now called ‘co-benefit potentials’ of household combustion - that is by addressing incomplete combustion we would reduce both health and climate damaging pollutants. We measured the emissions of over 50 different pollutants from 30 stove-fuel combinations in both India and China and these databases are still in use now, although they do need updating. So these two streams of interest added to the existing efforts in improved household fuels and stoves that came out of the 1970’s in the so called ‘other energy crisis’. Indeed the likes of ITDG (now Practical Action) has been one of the major actors in this field but in the early periods was mainly focused on improving fuel efficiency with the idea of reducing women’s work and protecting the natural environment. The large national programmes that were started in the early 80’s in India and China also had their focus almost entirely on fuel saving. Although the Chinese programme did feature chimneys they didn’t do any measurements of pollution and they had no real idea of the health effects at that time. There was another round of interest in stoves in the late 80’s, with many of the international agencies becoming involved including the World Bank, USAID and most of the large European aid agencies. There was also the creation of the Foundation for Woodstove Dissemination (FWD) with nodes all over the world and a laboratory in the Netherlands. However, these initiatives faded away in the early 90’s and then there was a kind of desert period. I think the reason for this, and it’s relevant to what is happening now, is that although some people were convinced of the benefits of improved household combustion, they had become disillusioned by the difficulties in actually accomplishing something that was effective. Contributing factors included a poor understanding of exactly how to disseminate these things at the household level and a somewhat, from my perspective anyway, disregard for the technical difficulties of stove design. People thought that anything they could throw together would be better than what people already had in the village but this wasn’t true, you have to bring in new technology, ceramics or metals for example, in order to get something that’s better. Thirdly, again from my perspective, it was unfortunate that there wasn’t a lot of information available about the hugely successful Chinese programme that had accomplished wonders, putting in somewhere in the order of 180 million improved stoves. Admittedly conditions in China are not the same as other places but nevertheless there was a real loss of interest in the donor community. Anyway our price was down and other things became of greater interest, and the health community was not on board yet either. The story I tell is when I went into air pollution meetings, even back in the early 80’s, and presented the results of our studies the air pollution people look at me aghast and say “Good Lord these are so much higher than we measure in other places and we know our health effects in these other places. You don’t need to know the exact health effects just go out and fix it.” Then I’d go across the street to the international health meeting, they used to laugh at us but they don’t do anymore, and they’d say “Well Dr Smith we think there are serious health effects here but in India we’ve got $7 per capita per year to spend on public health. Are you saying we take money from vaccines and antibiotics and give it to improved stoves?” And then they say, “We need to know exactly how much benefit we are going to get, because if we are going to spend another dollar, we are going to take one of those dollars and we’re going to ask somebody for another dollar, we need to know exactly what kind of benefits we are going to get.” So just extrapolating from air pollution levels somewhere else is not enough, you need to actually show the benefits in those populations for exactly the diseases of interest. So that’s how we’ve been focusing our biomedical research, by putting data into peer-reviewed medical literature so that they’ve got the evidence they need, in order to make these decisions. This is a long, expensive and rigorous process but by now we have a range of studies in various places by different people, using a variety of methods that are pinning down a range of these health effects but we are still doing more of that now. [top] [end]Major IssuesQ2) What would you say are the major issues in the Household Energy Sector today?Around the year 2000 the World Health Organisation organised a very large effort called the Comparative Risk Assessment, to examine the impacts globally of a range of risk factors that could be changed. This included things like cigarette smoking, unsafe sex, malnutrition, and high cholesterol, as well as indoor air pollution from solid fuel use and outdoor air pollution etc At this time we did a major review of the health effects literature which was very heavily peer reviewed and published the estimate that is commonly cited now of 1.6 million premature deaths annually from solid fuel use, about two thirds being children and one third women. These deaths are a significant amount, about a tenth or so, of all risk factors globally and in poor countries like India, third after malnutrition and unsafe water/sanitation. So for the first time the solid fuel use risk factor was put on the international map. Actually these figures are now being revised to accommodate the health effects studies that have been conducted since 2000. The current thinking is still that the major single effect is pneumonia in young children, probably followed by chronic lung disease in women who have cooked for many years over open fires. But now we have pretty good evidence on Tuberculosis (TB), cataracts and lung cancer in adults and low birth weight in children born to women who are exposed during pregnancy. Then because heart disease is the chief health outcome from cigarette smoking and outdoor air pollution, we strongly suspect that this is also from indoor pollution but there are no good studies yet. Then there is a set of impacts that we don’t really have good studies of in the field but have evidence for e.g. from animal studies. These include cognitive interaction/ learning abilities, because children who are heavily exposed are likely to have impaired mental abilities and also birth defects, such as cleft palate. So these are new things that haven’t been pinned down and will certainly not be included in this new risk assessment because we have no solid field data. In biomedical science, proving causality is a big part of the issue and as all the diseases that are created are multi factorial it’s a question of how much is caused by any one factor. This can’t be modelled, it has to be actually measured in the field. In any case I think it is pretty clear that there are serious health effects and one can argue about the magnitude of any particular one of the health outcomes and that would of course vary by local circumstances. However, on the other side of this equation is whether we can actually accomplish major improvements. On one level of course this is just another indicator of poverty - poor fuel use, poor household conditions, this is the nature of poverty. But because poverty is one of the causes it doesn’t mean that poverty alleviation is a very good solution, because this is expensive and takes a long time, time in which many people’s health is damaged. Causality also runs the other way, if you improve the health of the population then economic growth will be helped as well. So the question is that like clean water and sanitation, is there something you can do to help poor populations even before they become rich, are there levers in the form of clean fuels or better stoves to help them become more healthy? Earlier I mentioned the randomised trial that we have been conducting in Guatemala since 2001. Our measurements there are more intensive than anywhere else and are giving us a lot of insights into this problem. One insight is that a chimney alone doesn’t lower air pollution exposure sufficiently to get anything near to health guidelines. We found that indoor pollution levels went down by a factor of 10 in a household with a chimney, but the personal exposure, the amount of pollution actually breathed by the mothers and children who took part in the study, only went down by a factor of 2. This is because a chimney doesn’t eliminate the smoke it just moves it 1.5m away and it still stays around the household. Now a factor of 2 improvement still produced a 30-40% reduction in serious pneumonia so that is not something to take lightly, but on the other hand a factor of 2 still left the pollution levels 2 orders of magnitude above standards. It depends on your perspective of course, but there is a need to actually eliminate the pollution and not just move it down wind. There is a new set of technologies that greatly reduce emissions at source and among these are the advanced combustion devices like the so called semi-gasifier stoves, an awkward term, I just call them gasifier stoves. In our measurements these reduced emissions per meal by a factor of 15 - 20, producing very little smoke, at least when they are operating properly. One uncertainty at this point is there is not a lot of field data on the operation of these devices and we know things work very differently in real households than they do in the laboratory, the mantra of my group here is: ‘you don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect’. So that’s another thing that we are doing at this very moment, doing measurements with these improved devices in the field in India and China and we hope to have better data soon. They’re very promising but the problem is that they are an expensive technology that the farmers themselves can’t afford and donors won’t be willing to subsidise. However, with growing interest in the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from these devices, and with the operation of the international carbon market, there is the potential to sell carbon offsets and get the health benefits for free or nearly free. So this is the model that looks very attractive - a kind of three way, relatively expensive but very well performing technology, the cost of which you can charge partly to the international carbon market, partly to a government or donor who is interested in welfare benefits, with the rest put on the local market for the household to pay. You will need to somehow balance these three potential payers, each with their own set of criteria and time perspectives but I think it is achievable and that is what we are pursuing here. [top] [end]LPG for health and welfareQ3) Six years ago, in your paper titled 'In praise of petroleum' you argued that, contrary to popular belief, fossil fuels and in particular LPG ought "actually to be reserved to help fulfil our obligation to bring the health and welfare of all people to a reasonable level". Why do you say this?That was in response to some papers that have been prepared for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where it was argued that the rural areas of developing countries shouldn’t use petroleum. But what I was saying was that petroleum, LPG in particular, is such a great fuel that is relatively clean, efficient and easy to implement that we could look at it the other way round - that this very high quality fuel should be reserved for the most important task in the world, supporting the poor. In fact shifting all of the world’s poor to cooking with LPG wouldn’t have a significant impact on either GHG emissions or energy demand. I think I calculated that half a percent increase in the efficiency in the world’s automobile fleet for a few years would be sufficient to provide all of the cooking fuel needed. So to ask the poorest of the poor in the world to bear the brunt of controlling GHGs was a rather odd perspective. Now of course with the model I mentioned a minute ago, where you get the carbon market to pay, these technologies could be provided locally and still use renewable biomass fuels. [top] [end]Liquid FuelsQ4) What are your views on liquid fuels?From a health standpoint, biogas is one of the best fuels to use in many countries because being a gas it is easy to burn very cleanly, and it uses a locally available sustainable resources (i.e. animal dung). However, many places in the world do not have enough animals. Next easiest are liquid fuels. I have difficulty in knowing what to say about kerosene because first of all not a lot of systematic measurements have been done that I have seen, and those that have been done by us and others show quite a variation. I think the issue is that kerosene can be burned fairly cleanly in a good device, that is a pressurised stove or lamp, but it is often burned in simple wick stoves or lamps and they can be very polluting. It is almost impossible to burn gas in a dirty fashion but it is possible to burn liquid fuels badly, one has to be a little bit careful. This is particularly emphasised in one of the four recent health studies we’ve done in South Asia on TB and indoor air pollution. We’re just analysing the results now and the first one we finished is in Pokhara in Nepal. It showed not only an impact of biomass stoves but also of kerosene stoves and lamps, in the form of simple wick type devices. So one cannot just promote a liquid fuel without knowing the technology, as you can with gas. The other problem is that kerosene is not a uniform fuel around the world as it can vary in quality and sulphur content etc, so it’s a little more trickier than gas. On the other hand, with a good device that is well maintained it can be burned fairly cleanly, but not always, so I never know what to say. This might also be true with some of the newer types of liquid fuels that are coming out - ethanol, jatropha oil, and these kind of things. I bet that’s very similar, that properly burned they can be quite clean, but improperly burned they are probably not. In fact we’ve spun off two NGO’s from our research group here but each of them run by a different former student of mine and one of them, called Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, has a contract to do some measurements of ethanol stoves in Africa, so we’ll perhaps have some on this before long. So I guess gaseous fuel, from a health standpoint anyway, almost lets you not worry too much about the final technology, but with liquid fuels you are going to have to be a bit more concerned about the performance and maintenance of the device, at least that’s my understanding now, I think we’re still learning quite a bit about this. [top] [end]Anything else?Q5) Is there anything else you would like to mention in this interview?I have experienced at least two other major surges of interest in household energy but have seen both of them collapse without major sustained effort. Our community of people needs to work not only from the ground up, as we do all the time in developing new studies and measurements and so on, but to take advantage of this time to work from the top down. That is to push representatives in our own governments who are going to the climate change negotiations to put improved household combustion on the table. We also need to bring the health effects evidence to the attention of our development agencies and foundations. My experience is that the ground up stuff takes a long time to actually develop and seemingly nobody’s listening. Then all of a sudden you have a short window of time in which there is a policy opening, and if you don’t have that evidence ready, you can’t do it in such a short time. We are in one of these window times now and we should be sure to push on it. People are looking for cost effective ways of dealing with these major global problems, ill health in the third world and climate change are two of the big ones and we have a way to do that. I think nowhere is the nexus more strong for health and climate than it is in household combustion. There are other places where it’s connected, for instance outdoor air pollution and in cities. If you reduce fuel use you get better climate and outdoor air pollution benefits but it is not nearly as strong a connection as for household combustion, so now is the time to work on it. In addition, one has to recognise there is a lot of cynicism because of past perceived failures and therefore one has to be, at least in my opinion, quite rigorous about it and actually propose to do major things in the field to validate it. Nobody is going to want to spend billions of dollars to promote improved stoves on, for example, some kind of climate regime unless you can prove that you’ve done it. It’s a lot easier to verify what’s going on with 20 wind turbines than it is with 100.000 stoves. So we have to recognise the need for rigorous monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and that is in fact the premise behind the creation of the Berkeley Air Pollution Group is that it provides independent & rigorous M&E, for donors or investors. You can’t ask the promoters to evaluate themselves but unfortunately there are many promoters & NGO’s that are uncomfortable with independent verification but they I think going to have to get around that if we’re going to move this forward. What we are going to be asking for is billions of dollars, there are 500 million stoves out there we want to replace so even if they cost $20 each that’s $10 billion right there. It’s not money at the scale of nuclear power plants but it’s not small amounts either, so we need to bring ourselves up to speed in terms of meeting people’s needs. To date however relatively little money has been spent. My estimate is probably that since the beginning of this whole thing, less than $20 million has been spent on research. Every new coal fired power plant in China, that is about one built every week, has about $80 million of air pollution control on it, even in China where air pollution control isn’t famous for being rigorous. So that means every week, four times as much is being spent on air pollution control in every power plant in just one country than was spent in the entire history of improved stoves, and yet the air pollution exposure from stoves are many orders of magnitudes above that from power plants, let alone one power plant. This is an asynchronous world but this is nothing new. There are lots of examples of inequity in the world but we are in a window of time in which we can reduce that gap. [top] [end]@HEDON
[top] [end]Download the original article Viewpoints - An interview with Professor Kirk R. Smith (156 KB)[top] [end]Contents: Boiling Point 56 - Liquid fuels in the household
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