Project Surya

Project Surya is an integrated climate science, public health, and social science project to study the impacts of rural biomass and biofuel use on black carbon emissions and impact on global warming.

Project Surya is an integrated climate science, public health, and social science project to study the impacts of rural biomass and biofuel use on black carbon emissions and impact on global warming. The climate research seeks to confirm a growing mass of scientific evidence that cooking, lighting, heating, and small industry use of biofuels and biomass is one of the leading contributors of soot particles in the Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC) over much of Asia (which in turn has regional and global climate impacts second only to CO2). The public health study will pioneer new measurement technology to quantify public health impacts of the black carbon emissions. These are already known to have significant public health consequences; indoor air pollution is a leading cause of death particularly among rural women and children. CDF will be working on identifying what are the critical barriers limiting access to cleaner fuels and cooking technologies? How could stove design to be improved to better suit the cultural contexts of rural households’ cooking and fuel collection? What are the factors that determine households’ willingness to pay for improved stoves and/or fuel? The technology to reduce these emissions exists; the challenge is how to build and deploy it more effectively. Dr. Jessica Wallack (Director) is a Principal Investigator on the project, along with Professor V. Ramanthan (Scripps Institute of Oceanography); Prof. Kalpana Balakrishnan (Sri Ramachandra University); and Hafeez Rehman (TERI).

Keywords: environment, air pollution, rural energy

Website: http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/ProjectSurya.html