MECS is a five-year £40m project, working with the World Bank, to find innovative and modern cooking alternatives to biomass fuels, such as charcoal and wood, that are clean, affordable, reliable and sustainable.
Currently, over a third of the world’s population cook using these polluting fuels, leading to around four million premature deaths each year – primarily among women and children. Using charcoal and wood to cook also has a significant impact on climate change, contributing three per cent of the total CO2 emissions every year.
Tackling this issue is essential if the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 – ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all – is to be achieved by 2030.
The MECS side event – “SDG7: How do we Scale Low Carbon Cooking?” – is taking place in the SDG7 Pavilion at COP26 today, from 3-3.45pm GMT. Clean cooking has been a neglected component of the SDG Agenda. The session will focus on nurturing the growing international political will to finally tackle the issue head on, but will also strongly make the case that tackling clean cooking has to be clearly placed within a ‘net zero by 2050’ strategy.
The session is being run in partnership with the Government of Kenya, the World Bank, the Clean Cooking Alliance, the Transforming Energy Access programme, the Efficiency for Access coalition, the Energy Network Nexus, the Africa-Europe Partnership, ENERGIA and Loughborough’s Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme.
Participants will include stakeholders engaged in national energy planning, international assistance programmes, international finance (particularly new forms of carbon finance), public utility management and the large and small-scale private sectors.
Register here to participate virtually in this event and all other events taking place in the SDG7 Pavilion.
The full agenda for the SDG7 Pavilion can be viewed here.