Project Surya

Project Surya aims to mitigate the regional impacts of global warming by reducing atmospheric concentrations of black carbon, methane, and ozone. Project Surya will replace the highly polluting cookstoves traditionally employed in rural areas with clean-cooking technologies. Project Surya employs innovative sensing technologies to measure the positive climate and health impacts by a means of a mobile phone platform that measures ‘black carbon’ concentrations and collects the climate and public-health data.

Project Surya’s Objectives:
1. Enable wider access to cleaner cooking technologies.
2. Leverage cutting-edge mobile phone technology to gather data on climate and health outcomes.
3. Use the data to scale up the project.

Projected timeframe and scope of activities:
1. Pilot phase (2009-2010) – completed; 2500 people
2. Demonstration phase (2011-2013); 50000 people in North India
3. Replication phase (2014-2020); 10-20 million people in Africa, Asia and Latin America
4. Global policy phase (2020-2025); 3 billion people worldwide.

Expected outcomes of the project in the long run are regional increase in food and water supply, decrease in deforestation and aid to poverty alleviation, complemented by global effects of saving millions of human lives and effectively mitigating climate change.project Surya