A solar cooker is “a device which uses the energy of sunlight to heat food or drink to cook it or sterilize it.”  Solar Cookers International (SCK) was founded in 1987 in the Central Valley of California. SCK started by pooling its knowledge to produce “solar cooking manuals to help others build and use simple solar box cookers similar to those developed in the mi-1970s by Barbara Kerr and Sherry Cole.” 

Solar cooking can improve health by preventing dirty cooking, which produces air pollution causing major health problems like COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), asthma, lung cancer, pneumonia, and respiratory tract infections.

In Tanzania, a group of women who used solar cooking for 10 months saw their health problems from smoke decrease from 77% down to 13%. Equally important, it can also reduce cooking expenses. “The sun is free”, so as soon as a person, family or enterprise has access to solar technology, they are saving what they are supposed to invest in cooking with fossil fuel.

In addition, SCK has training sessions that promotes and provides training in use and construction of solar cookers, which can reduce cooking expenses even more. It can also prevent deforestation by reducing demand for charcoal made from wood.

SCK uses the acronym “CARES” to describe the solar cooking process.“C” is the collection of the energy through reflectors on a solar a cooker. “A” stands for absorbing solar energy through black cookware. “R” means retaining the heat to use it for cooking, rather than losing it tothe ambient air. “E” means efficient and easy, while “S” indicates safety. There are three types of solar cooking that use this process: (1) reflective panel cooker (2) solar box ovens and (3) parabolic reflector.

SCK expressed that the principal reason for attending COP23 is to make more people aware about the environmental and health benefits of solar cooking. Only a quarter of the Parties include cooking in their climate change plans and only two mentioned solar cooking as a mechanism to achieve the target of their NDCs. The challenge is to help Parties realize that solar cooking and clean cooking are mechanisms for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

So, can solar cooking improve the Paris Agreement implementation? The answer is yes. Encouraging the use of solar cooking in homes, business establishments, and schools would: (1) reduce environmental harms like deforestation, (2) improve health reducing smoking effects, and (3) reduce fossil fuel investments.