Ever since my site visit to Nepal in 2009, I’ve been a fan of biodigesters.
Basically, what happens is that farmers collect all of their livestock waste and they put it in a concrete pit, where the waste breaks down into methane and slurry (fertilizer).
The methane can be piped into the house and used as a biogas for electricity and cooking. Greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced. People have free lighting at night and they cook with clean gas, not with smokey wood or charcoal. It’s a beautiful technology.
So what I’m doing here is I’m trying to quantify how these biodigesters impact farmers’ lives. There is a lot of money available for climate finance right now, but it’s not clear how much of that money actually stays in local villages and communities. So my Phd is just about bean counting: I want to know how the World Bank and the UNFCCC can make climate aid stick to the household level.
This means I get to go to beautiful places and enter people’s homes in picturesque villages and ask them, with the assistance of a translator, how much money they earn.
Of course they beat me to the punch asking first, how old am I, and second, am I married. And I lie about both. I tell them I’m much older than I look, and I’m married to a very successful man. We have two children. We think Cambodia is the most beautiful country on earth.
Who knows if what they’re telling me is true or not. But so far, it really looks like this small technological intervention can change lives.
In my wildest dreams I would identify a recipe — some project design principles — whereby climate finance would directly impact villagers and the “technical assistance” from Europe and the United States would have a clear expiration date.
