A9.1. Introduction
Standards that clearly define levels for technology performance, quality, and impact assessment provide common terminology for communicating, understanding, and improving performance of clean cooking solutions. Setting standards is an effective way of implementing health-based guidelines through providing specific technology-based targets for certification, regulation, and labelling. Consumers rely on standards to make informed choices, while designers and manufacturers use standards to affirm their product quality and/or are encouraged to innovate to meet standards. Policy-makers, donors, programmes and investors can use standards as a credible basis for comparing stove performance and quality.
Standards can also help to translate ambitious evidence-based guidelines into specific targets that reflect additional stakeholder priorities and that allow for the guidelines to be achieved over time. Standards processes are inclusive and consensus-based, permitting buy-in from multiple stakeholder groups. They should be achievable by the private sector, address consumer needs, while also driving the sector towards goals like the WHO guidelines. Cooking practices and cuisines vary globally, but it is valuable to have international harmonization to facilitate the sharing of information about stove and other device performance. Thus, an international standards process allows countries to collaborate on standards that are relevant for their national contexts, requiring minimal adaptation before national adoption.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC) has been facilitating development of international standards, ensuring participation of all types of stakeholders in multiple countries. The Alliance has partnered with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a nongovernment agency which supports national standards organizations.
ISO provides multiple consensus-based and transparent processes, enabling clean cooking sector experts to draft and approve standards. International Workshop Agreements (IWAs) are a streamlined ISO consensus process that can be a first step towards formal ISO standards. To achieve real inclusiveness, consensus, and incorporation of multi-stakeholder input, the formal ISO standards development process can take at least three years. National standards organizations that are members of ISO have channels for participating in international standards development, allowing the clean cooking sector to leverage these existing paths. Once international standards are developed, many countries have policies to prioritize adoption of standards developed by the ISO.
A9.2. Development of the International Workshop
Agreement (IWA)
In February 2011, at the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA) Biennial Forum in Lima, Peru, the Lima Consensus was developed as a framework for tiered standards for key indicators. The community worked throughout the next year to develop a tiered set of exposure, efficiency, and safety standards for clean cookstoves. This culminated in the International Workshop Agreement (IWA 11:2012 Guidelines for evaluating cookstove performance) a year later, in February 2012.1 At this International Workshop, which was jointly convened in The Hague by the GACC and PCIA, more than 90 stakeholders from 23 countries reached a consensus on the tiers and indicators. The IWA represents a significant step forward in global efforts to develop standards to scale up clean cookstoves and fuels. There were also six resolutions that identified areas for further discussion and effort. These were related to protocol development, harmonization, and expanding of indicators. It was also agreed that future development of standards should reflect these new WHO indoor air quality guidelines. The sector has been collaborating to address these resolutions and identify any additional steps needed to address remaining gaps.
The IWA provides a framework for rating cookstoves using four indicators: efficiency, total emissions, indoor emissions, and safety. Each of these indicators is quantified and mapped to yield five tiers of performance (see ).
The four multi-tiered dimensions of the current IWA on cookstove standards.
The IWA is designed with three main goals in mind. The first goal is that the tiers of performance should allow the sector to acknowledge progress (from a baseline of Tier 0) while setting aspirational goals (Tier 4). For the indoor emissions indicator, the emissions rate that qualifies stoves for Tier 4 is based on that which will result in meeting existing WHO indoor air quality guidelines for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) (annual average interim target (IT)-1 of 35 μg/m3) (1) and CO (24-hr average of 7 mg/m3) (2) using an earlier version of the single-zone model described in Review 3.
The second goal of the IWA is to allow organizations and countries to select indicators and tiers based on local priorities, adding flexibility to enable the framework to be used globally.
Finally, the third goal is to adopt a structure that allows for the harmonization of different test protocols that are in use in different countries.
To date, tiers of performance have been mapped to the water boiling test version 4.1.2,2 and efforts to establish tiers of performance for other protocols are ongoing. Several countries and organizations have begun using the IWA as the basis for establishing national and organizational standards.
A9.3. Updating the IWA: towards international standards
To update these initial IWA guidelines and establish them as international standards, the sector has been working through ISO processes. ISO Technical Committee (TC) 285, the body that will develop and approve these standards, was approved in June 2013. Kenya, through the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS), and the The United States of America of America, through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), are serving as co-secretariats of the committee. As of July 2014, the committee comprised 20 participating countries, 14 observing countries and 7 international external liaisons organizations, including WHO. Standards-relevant activities and drafting of standards will be done through working groups of experts formed within the committee, with drafts presented for approval through ISO TC 285. Discussions through TC 285 may include updates to the IWA based on new findings, including the findings in this WHO guidelines document, protocol development and harmonization, and use of additional methodologies or indicators.
A9.4. Testing facilities and protocol development
Testing is essential for technology development. It allows communication of stove performance to implementers, donors, government programmes and users, and evaluation of technologies against standards, including their potential to achieve these guidelines. Third-party testing is especially important to ensure results are unbiased. Testing may be done in laboratory environments under controlled conditions or under realistic conditions in homes where parameters may be harder to control. While laboratory and field testing results do not always correlate well, both are necessary to evaluate whether technologies under consideration may achieve indoor air quality guidelines. Because achieving indoor air quality guidelines depends on technology performance and use, evaluating both factors is necessary.
Most testing results to date (see Stove Performance Inventory Report 20123 and Clean Cooking Catalog http://catalog.cleancookstoves.org) have come from laboratories in developed countries. More laboratory and field testing capacity is needed, especially in developing countries where the use of solid fuels for cooking and the resulting household air pollution (HAP) are major concerns. Developing capacity by setting up regional testing and knowledge centres (RTKCs) is ongoing through grants and training workshops. The aim is to establish sustainable institutions that can provide high quality testing services and catalyse regional activities. These centres are working together as a consortium to standardize methods and establish best practices and common data formats to share testing results. Remaining challenges include data management and quality assurance testing to ensure better standardized results.
There has been significant progress in protocol development and standardization, especially through the ongoing TC 285 international standards process. Work is in progress to address controlled laboratory testing gaps for specific stove types (i.e. griddle stoves, batch-fed stoves), and for the assessment of durability and uncertainty in test measurements. Also in development are protocols for evaluating robustness of technologies to a variety of usage conditions, and to improve protocols so that they better reflect actual use in homes. Many field testing protocols exist, but more standardization of methodologies, as well as more guidance, are needed, particularly guidance that addresses in-home performance, use, acceptance, and displacement of traditional technologies in an integrated framework.
Carbon finance has stimulated a great deal of activity in the clean cooking sector, and the assessment of impact uses similar methodologies for evaluating technologies. There are also emerging opportunities to include health impacts in climate-based investment. This new phase of standards development should seek harmonization of methodologies, whether these are for carbon impact assessment, national testing and certification designed for health improvement, or other purposes.
Capacity building for testing and protocol development should be complemented by systems and resources to share test data with the sector, with consumers, investors, donors, and programmes. There is widespread consensus on the need for comprehensive and transparent resources indicating how current technologies and fuels perform in the laboratory and the field. The Clean Cooking Catalog (see Stove Performance Inventory Report 201215 and Clean Cooking Catalog http://catalog.cleancookstoves.org) is an online global database providing stove and fuel information such as stove features, specifications, emissions levels, efficiency, and safety derived from laboratory and field testing. The Catalog provides an opportunity for manufacturers to share information about their products, and for testing organizations to share independent performance data related to stoves and fuels. This online platform can easily be updated with new data submitted by manufacturers and testing organizations.
A9.5. Regulation and certification
There are a number of mechanisms that can be used to implement and enforce standards and communicate technology quality and performance to users.
Adoption of standards reflecting these guidelines can be used to regulate technologies imported or manufactured locally. Because the standards framework is based on tiered indicators, the standards can become stricter over time, as more and more technologies become available. As standards are updated, there may be other methodologies or indicators that are relevant. For example, methodologies and indicators that reflect in-home performance can be used to provide improved assessments of adoption and potential to achieve indoor air quality guidelines and targets. Governments may also consider regulations for ambient air quality based on existing air quality guidelines, and extending monitoring and enforcement beyond the main urban areas to include rural communities. However, there remain challenges for apportioning the contribution of ambient and indoor air quality to different sources, particularly in urban areas with many different sources of air pollution.
Certification processes are needed to ensure credible and standardized reporting and labelling. It is important to work with those national organizations with the mandate and experience to carry out product certification, in order to implement standards and certify technologies for their potential to meet indoor air quality targets. Certification can apply to products to evaluate performance and quality, as well as to the evaluation of testing centres' ability to produce quality results.
Labels are a means of communicating technology performance and quality to users. The effectiveness of labels depends on how well information is presented, whether there are associated consumer awareness campaigns, and whether the labelling system is enforced to minimize counterfeiting. Studies are needed to evaluate appropriate label designs and whether and how they affect consumer decisions.
- 1
- 2
As of July 2014, the current version is 4.2.2.
- 3
