First ISO International Workshop Agreement on Clean Cookstoves Unanimously Approved

According to the World Health Organization, exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and young children among the most affected. In order to mitigate this risk and facilitate large-scale dissemination of clean cookstoves, stakeholders in the developing and developed world have recognized the need for an international standard to contain commonly agreed upon and accepted criteria by which to define "clean" cookstoves.

As a first step, the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA) and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (the Alliance), organized an International Workshop on cookstoves [see related news item]. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) served as secretariat for the workshop, which was held on February 28-29, 2012, in the Hague, Netherlands. During the two-day conference, more than 80 public- and private-sector stakeholders representing more than 20 countries worked toward facilitating the widespread use of clean, efficient, and safe cookstove technology through standardization. Ultimately, the participants reached unanimous consensus on a draft International Workshop Agreement (IWA), which will be published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the coming months.

Radha Muthiah, executive director of the Alliance, said, "This workshop represents the first implementation milestone toward reaching our goal of 100 million homes using clean cookstoves by 2020."

Once published, the IWA on cookstoves will provide a framework for rating cookstoves against tiers of performance for a variety of indicators, and will serve as a tool for policy-makers, investors, manufacturers, and others in the cookstoves community.

Materials from the workshop will be made available in the coming weeks on the organizer's website. For further information on the International Workshop on Clean Cookstoves, please contact Leslie McDermott, ANSI program manager for international development, at [email protected].