Saving Cambodia’s Forests, one stove at a time :

GERES Cambodia’s Improved Cookstove Project Reaches 1 Million Stoves

Phnom Penh, Cambodia – The numbers are staggering: 2.4 billion people around the world cook with animal dung or, if they’re lucky, wood, on basic stoves which are often no more than a few rocks clustered together; 1.6 million women and children die every year from using these stoves; 10 million Cambodians use wood for cooking; and if allowed to continue, within our lifetime all of Cambodia’s natural forests will go, quite literally, up in smoke. But amid all these numbers, there are some positives- in Cambodia an organization is working with local craftsmen to make stoves that burn less wood, reducing demand on local forests. And on March 18th, in a small village outside Phnom Penh, the 1,000,000th New Lao Stove was made and sent to market.

“Let’s consider it the achievement of all stove makers in the world. Proof that disseminating large numbers of improved cookstoves is not a dream anymore, but can be a reality," Iwan Baskoro, technical manager of the Group for the Environment, Renewable Energy and Solidarity (GERES), says. Indeed, the issue is a tricky one. . .