Win-Win Scenarios at the Climate-Development Interface: Challenges and Opportunities for Cookstove Replacement Programs Through Carbon Finance
31 Pages Posted: 21 Sep 2010 Last revised: 11 Feb 2014
Date Written: September 20, 2010
Abstract
Achieving win-win outcomes in environment-development programs is a laudable goal, but frequently difficult to realize. In this paper we review the possibilities for win-win climate and development outcomes in programs that distribute improved efficiency cookstoves (ICS) with the use of carbon finance. We show that ICS technologies form an important, if asymmetrical, environment-development interface, and illustrate the mutually supported local (development) and global (climate change) benefits of continued improved stoves use. We also describe how program results are highly contextual and that, in practice, there are a number of challenges to achieving effective ‘win-win’ outcomes. While carbon finance provides an opportunity to fund scaleable and enforceable stove programs, it may also introduce mutually supported impediments. Drawing on development debates for ICS use, scientific reports on stove-based greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, and preexisting case studies of carbon and non-carbon financed cookstoves, we conclude that the challenge for future carbon financed ICS projects will be to leverage inherent symbioses between climate and development arenas in order to overcome mutually supported impediments. Achieving substantive win-win conditions will require further scholarly and practical engagement to tackle the many outstanding challenges and uncertainties reviewed in this essay.
Keywords: Climate, Development, Carbon Finance, Cookstoves, Win-Win
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