Cleaning Up a Mess in the Kitchen with Cookstove Offsets

by Tom Price, Founder and CEO of EcoSafi

Let’s start with the terrifying, stupefying basics: the leading source of climate emissions per household in the developing world, causing more death and disease from household air pollution than tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS combined, and one of the biggest drivers of the deforestation ripping the lungs out of our planet is…. making dinner.

Every day more than two billion people suffer through toxic smoke from fires of wood, charcoal, or even dung in their homes. Emissions from cooking emit more CO2 than the global aviation industry. If you’ve ever cooked over a campfire and smelled the smoke on your clothes for days, imagine doing that multiple times a day, every day, for years. 

Solving this problem is critical for people and our planet. The good news? There are solutions, and more money than even pouring into climate solutions. The bad news? While it seemed like progress was being made for a moment, recent scandals have thrown the brakes on getting climate investment where it can have the most impact. Meanwhile, billions sit in the smoke and suffer. To understand how to fix this mess—a clear solution to a pressing need, with money sitting on the sidelines—you need to first understand how we got into it.

For decades, people have worked incredibly hard with few resources to solve this problem, focusing on efficient stoves that use less firewood and charcoal. And in recent years there’s been a push to “fuel switch” to cleaner fuels and stoves like ethanol, electricity, LPG or gasified biomass pellets. Switching can cut up to 3 tons of CO2 per household per year. But there’s never been enough money to get these solutions into the hands of the people who need them most. Until recently.

Starting as a trickle in 2017, and then a flood, a tidal wave of cash from carbon credits poured in. Clean cooking became one of the fastest-growing segments of the voluntary carbon market, up more than 3X in less than a year.

But that flow of credits is now at risk. A recent peer-reviewed analysis published by Gill-Wiehl et al. from UC Berkeley in the journal Nature Sustainability found significant risk of over-crediting. Of the millions of offsets they looked at, they estimated that methodological errors and incorrect metrics led projects to be over-credited by as much as 10X. The paper is part of a growing chorus of concern over offset quality. Media coverage has cited examples of projects generating unproven offsets, like this one in India which sold millions of offsets to Shell which may not have taken place.  

To address concerns about provability, carbon credit rating agencies have emerged to independently validate offset claims. So far, only a few clean cooking projects reviewed by the ratings agency BeZero have received even a moderately passing grade for provable impact.

The resulting criticism has caused offset prices from clean cooking projects to collapse, from an average of ~$12 to less than $4, according to Qcintel.com, taking vital resources from clean cooking companies just as they are beginning to scale their impact. Buyers are fleeing in search of provable impact that doesn’t include reputational risk. 

This mirrors the turmoil roiling the market for REDD carbon offsets, where scandals alleging that as much as 90% of offsets are fake have engulfed leading projects, and influenced the ouster of the CEOs of both carbon offset unicorn South Pole and leading issuing agency Verra. 

Even as the debate rages about the merits of companies using carbon credits as part of their decarbonization strategies, the facts are absolutely clear: buying quality offsets drives real-world positive impact, saving lives and forests. 

In Africa, carbon revenue can play a vital role in helping hundreds of millions of families live cleaner, healthier, more prosperous lives. Leaving trees standing instead of using them to cook, while subsidizing sustainably produced and lower-carbon replacement fuels has a real, tangible, and trackable carbon impact. 

For the clean cooking carbon market to work properly, we now know it is mission-critical to effectively prove the positive impact of using clean cookstoves. The critical question is, how to separate the smoke from the fire? How to verify that impact, to help finance more?

New technology, tools, and techniques provide an intuitive answer: measure how much clean fuel is sold and how much the clean stoves are used. On simple improved cookstoves that use less firewood or charcoal, deploying affordable stove-use-monitoring sensors like those made by Geocene can allow accurate proof-of-use even in remote settings. UC Berkeley has also compiled detailed guidance for buyers and developers on how to deliver the impact we all want, with the verifiability that today’s market demands.

A stringent new methodology now exists, offering offset buyers the verifiable impact they seek: the Gold Standard Metered and Measured Energy for Cooking Devices. This methodology, ranked highest by the carbon ratings agency Abatable among various options available to project developers, demands that clean cooking project developers demonstrate their impact by meticulously tracking the amount of clean fuel they purchase and utilize.

So far only about 1.3% of all clean cooking projects use the recommended GS-Metered methodology, but perhaps it’s not surprising why. This level of detail costs more money and likely lowers the number of carbon credits generated. Those strong disincentives will only be overcome when buyers both demand quality and then prove they will pay for it. 

Even though this new approach may cost project developers in volume, there are clear signs they can make it up in pricing. Last week, the Gold Standard issued the first carbon credits in Africa under the MECD to my company, EcoSafi. Today we’ve already received an offer to buy all of them for $30 each, almost 10X the current spot market price, and on Monday we received the first-ever “A” rating from independent ratings agency BeZero for a clean cooking project. This proves that quality can pay off. 

Carbon finance is a powerful tool to deliver clean cooking, and the clear consensus among market actors, academics, and policymakers is that using these new tools and approaches, like tracking use through fuel purchases or sensors, offers the best way to prove impact. That will give carbon credit buyers the confidence they need to invest the billions required to give the world’s cooks the healthy home and stable planet they deserve.