Worldwide around 1.6 billion people depend on forest resources for fuel, food, water, medicines, traditional cultures and livelihoods [1]. More than 40% of the world’s population depends on the biomass as their primary cooking fuel [2–4], of which approximately 90% live in sub-Saharan Africa, still depend on traditional biomass energy [5, 6]. On 2040 [7] reports that, 1.8 billion people will remain reliant on traditional biomass energy as a cooking fuel, with the overwhelming majority living in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
In Africa, in spite of the availability of various energy sources, more than 80% of the total population in most countries is still using traditional biomass as the main source of energy for cooking [7]. Currently, several strategies were designed to reduce fuel wood consumption and GHGs emission by implementing improved cookstoves (ICS), increasing efficient fuel use and changing the cooking behaviors [8–11]. Although in sub-Saharan Africa and the Least Developed Countries, only 7% of people who rely on solid fuels use improved cook-stoves [12]. In Ethiopia also, biomass is the main form of fuel for approximately for 92% of the population [13, 14].
The rate of deforestation and forest degradation resulting carbon dioxide emission to the atmosphere are still immense [15]. Assess to fuelwood is one of the major anthropogenic activities resulting in land degradation and causing significant negative impact on the forest [5, 16]. Approximately 1–2.4 Gt CO2 e of GHGs are emitted annually in the production and use of fuelwood and charcoal, which is 2–7% of the global anthropogenic emissions[17]. Due to the dependency on biomass, the CO2 emission in Ethiopia has increased from 5.1 million tons in 2005 to 6.5 million tons in 2010 [14].
The national improved cook stove program of Ethiopia aims to support the distribution of 9 million ICS by 2018. The long-term goal is to disseminate 31 million stoves before 2030 [18]. These program introduced an active ICS production and sales sector with current annual sales of approximately 66,000 injera ICS (Mirte) and 16,000 rocket-type ICS woodstoves (Tikikil) [19].
The main reason for introducing ICS was to reduce forest degradation [8, 16, 20–21], reduce indoor and outdoor pollution[10, 22], improve the quality of health [23–25], improve the socioeconomic benefit [26] and reduce the GHGs emission[14, 16]. However, the adoption of ICSs has been still very slow [27]. The adoption rate of ICS technology in developing countries depends on the socio-cultural settings [27–29]. The GHGs emission from the burning wood also depends on various factors such as kitchen characteristics, stove characteristics, type of fuel, quantity of fuel, method of cooking and time-activity profile of the household [22]. For instance, in the study site, the staple food items called “Injera” baking consumes over 60% of the entire household cooking fuel [30].
Despite the fact ICSs are better option than the traditional stove; there is little empirical evidence on fuel use performance and GHG emission of improved wood stoves [2, 8]. The performance of wood stove in fuel reduction was mainly assessed using experimental methods such as water boiling test and controlled cooking test[2].While, the more representative method is kitchen performance test (KPT), a stove performance test that quantifies fuelwood used in the household under the actual use [2, 31]. Nowadays, very few studies have been published with this method [2, 32]. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to assess the performance of improved (“Mirt” and “Tikikil”) and traditional cook stove on fuelwood consumption and climate change mitigation in the kitchens of real households using KPT methods.