The December 2011 issue of Energy Policy features a special section on cooking fuels and technologies in developing countries.  The issue was guest edited by myself along with Shonali Pachauri, Wesley Foell and Daniel Spreng and can be found here.  The Special Issue comes out of a workshop the four of us organized back in 2008 as part of the International Association for Energy Economics Annual Conference in Istanbul.  We had brought together a great group of folks representing academia, practitioners, donors, and industry to discuss issues related to the diffusion of cleaner cooking fuels and technologies.  As many readers already know, over 2.5 billion people rely on traditional burning of biomass for their primary cooking.  This has all sorts of associated social and environmental outcomes including lost time due to fuel collection, contributions to deforestation and, very importantly, acute health effects due to indoor air pollution (resulting in more annual deaths than malaria).  It’s been a long process but we’ve finally been able to publish some of those papers along with some other papers that we solicited from experts in the field to produce a journal issue that covers a number of the major topics in this area.  It includes papers on benefit-cost analysis, household decision-making, air quality and climate impacts of cookstoves, energy indicators, etc.  We hope you find it interesting and useful.

UPDATE:  IIASA (where my co-editor Shonali Pachauri works) has released a press release on the special issue.