MIRPURKHAS: Surrounded by cauldrons, clay pots and utensils, Sonari Mitthoo sits on the floor of her mud house in the southern Pakistani district of Mirpurkhas as she prepares lunch for her family.

Thanks to her new zero-carbon stove, the 35-year-old mother of nine cooks food without choking on smoke and while adapting to climate change in Pakistan’s flood-hit Sindh province.

Karachi-based NGO Revive Environment Private Limited (REPL) distributed around 500 of these climate-friendly stoves in rural communities in Sindh this year, according to its senior manager operations Muhammad Ramzan.

Woman villagers in Mirpurkhas, Thatta, Umerkot and Sujawal districts have since been benefitting from these devices, which were given to them free of cost.

“This stove emits very little smoke while wood consumption is also nominal,” Mitthoo told Arab News, while cooking inside her house in Ramzan Arain village of Mirpurkhas.

“The other [traditional] stoves would make us cough because they used to emit a lot of smoke.”

These new stoves have been designed to ensure efficient air flow that improves combustion in the chamber, which in turn increases the temperature manifolds.

This extraordinary increase in temperature burns out small smoke particles. These climate-friendly stoves have a 4-inch opening to place pots and utensils above them, unlike wider hobs of traditional stoves that waste much of the heat, resulting in less smoke and faster cooking, according to Ramzan.

REPL plans to distribute around 2 million climate-friendly stoves over the next 5 years as Pakistan seeks global funding to hedge against future climate shocks, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dolling out a $200 million first tranche to the country under its $1.4 billion Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) earlier this month.

Climate Action Accelerator (CAA), a Geneva-based not-for-profit entity working to contain global warming well below two degrees and to strengthen climate resilience, says access to clean cooking stoves and fuels reduces greenhouse gas emissions, creating positive health and wellbeing outcomes for people.

“This stove is good for us because it does not cause us any coughing and does not generate any coal,” Mitthoo said.

Pakistan is ranked among the world’s top climate-affected nations. Intense rains and floods this year killed more than 1,000 people and damaged crops and infrastructure worth billions of dollars in Pakistan’s Sindh, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces. Deforestation and glacial melting are the two leading causes compounding the climate crisis in the country.

Pakistan lost nearly 8 percent of its tree cover from 2001 to 2024, according to Global Forest Watch, a forest monitoring digital platform.

At least 78 percent (6,870 hectares) of tree cover loss was due to logging, followed by wildfires at 12 percent (1,080 hectares), permanent agriculture (492 hectares), temporary disturbances like natural disasters (184 hectares) and new settlements and infrastructure (179 hectares).

“One big benefit of this stove is that it is fuel efficient and does not consume too much wood,” said Mitthoo who sees floods inundating her village almost every rainy season, killing people and animals and forcing her family to evacuate.
Hussan Bano, an official at the government-funded Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO), said REPL’s cookstove pilot project WAS helping reduce deforestation and environmental degradation in rural areas.

“This [new stove] has a specialty that it uses less wood, produces less smoke and saves time,” she told Arab News. “It also keeps the environment clean.”

Faisal Mustafa, an SRSO organizer in Mirpurkhas, said the smoke-free cookstoves were helping women save about 70 percent of firewood, thus indirectly reducing deforestation.

“These stoves emit lesser smoke and the women of our households who were burning 10 kilograms of wood are now burning only two to three kilograms,” he said.

“When the smoke is reduced, the production of greenhouse gases is reduced. When there is less greenhouse gases production, it is very good for our climate.”

REPL plans to scale up the distribution of these stoves to approximately 1 million in rural Sindh, followed by an additional one million across rural Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, according to Ramzan.

The NGO is in the process of registering its cookstove project with international registry VERRA, a non-profit that operates standards in environmental and social markets, including the world’s leading Verified Carbon Standard crediting program.

The fresh distribution would commence after the completion of the registry process and fulfillment of all regulatory requirements.

“We aim to commence mass distribution by the third quarter of 2026,” Ramzan said, adding they intend to complete registration and fulfil regulatory requirements before that.