Project Surya

Mission

Project Surya's Mission:
Achieving immediate mitigation of global warming by leading and measuring humanity's shift away from black carbon-, CO2-, and ozone precursor-emitting activities.

Project Surya's Vision:
A climate future in which human practices no longer result in significant black carbon, ozone-precursor, and other global warming emissions, and in which current and future palliative actions on CO2 have time to take hold and arrest human-created climate change.

Organization Type Academia

Contact Information

This information has been removed as it is likely no longer accurate

Primary Initiatives, Target Populations, and Scope of Work:

Project Surya promotes better health for people and the planet by replacing traditional fire cooking with clean-cooking technologies, through unprecedented measurements of air quality and exposure, and by innovatively using mobile phones to gather data and track outcomes.

Surya is a scientific intervention experiment aimed at quantifying the radiative forcing due to black carbon from biomass-fueled cooking and heating fires. Roughly 2.5 billion depend on biomass burning for cooking and heating which contributes about 25% of the global black emissions. Absorption of solar radiation by black carbon is estimated to contribute as much as 20% to 55% of the carbon dioxide to global warming. Black carbon is also emerging as a major contributor to the observed retreat of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers and snow packs.

Currently, Project Surya is in a one-year pilot phase studying about 300 households in Khairatpur village in rural India. The study involves an awareness campaign in the village in partnership with village leadership and local NGOs; introduction of incentive programs to improve compliance; deployment and demonstration of improved cook stoves; installation of black carbon and carbon monoxide monitoring devices in homes and outdoors; measurement of the scattering and absorption properties of fresh and aged aerosols; and distribution of cell phones for gathering exposure data.

Data from the pilot phase testing will be used to scale to phase 1. In phase 1 Project Surya will deploy inexpensive energy-efficient cookers to between five to ten thousand residents in rural India and scientifically document their role in reducing atmospheric emissions of biofuel burning compounds. By using data collected in phase 1, the project can be additionally scaled up to first include other areas of India and later to other developing nations where substantial solid-fuel use occurs.

Fuels/Technologies: Biomass
Solar
Sectors of Experience: Education
Environment
Countries of Operation: India

Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas

Social/Cultural barriers to using traditional fuels and stoves:

Project Surya is addressing social and cultural barriers by utilizing emerging product design and marketing approaches that focus on rural women as “customers” with multifaceted needs and address the entire product life cycle. To do this we will be carrying out household-level “customer profile” surveys of socio-economic characteristics and examining correlations between these characteristics and the stove adoption and usage patterns observed during the one year deployment and monitoring of stoves. We also intend to locate a small team of researchers in the village to carry out a detailed ethnography of fuel collection and cooking in the context of other household responsibilities. The researchers will use a “demonstration hut” to collect controlled measurements of indoor pollution and to train villagers on using the new stoves.


Market development for improved cooking technologies:

n/a


Technology standardization for cooking, heating and ventilation:

Project Surya is field testing a number of improved cook stoves and modifications during its pilot phase. Results will be published.


Indoor air pollution exposure and health monitoring:

Project Surya researchers at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA will implement a public health monitoring tool using Qualcomm cell phones to aid epidemiologists studying the health risks associated with villagers' (study participants') exposure to indoor air pollution. Target participants will carry a mobile phone equipped with a Global Position Satellite (GPS) receiver and camera. Data collection and analysis software running on the phones will allow researchers to collect continuous measurements of participants' time-location-activity profiles and cooking duration, and daily measurements of BC levels indoors. Each day, the mobile phone will wirelessly upload the continuous time series of collected data to a server. Data, which will be made available to Project Surya researchers, will be used to calculate each participant's exposure to indoor pollution. The application will be designed to require minimal effort on the part of the participant, will have little or no literacy requirements, and will be made locally and culturally specific.

Relevant Publications or Studies

Please visit projectsurya.org for a list and link to relevant publications and additional information.

Our Contribution to the Partnership

Project Surya would participate through publishing of findings and networking.