Cookstoves

A comprehensive quality assessment of cookstoves carbon credits

Over 2 billion people cook with smoky biomass or kerosene, contributing to 2-3 million premature deaths annually and roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Efficient stoves can reduce emissions by using less fuel or switching to a less GHG-intensive fuel and achieving more complete combustion, which emits less methane and other pollutants. They can also reduce time spent collecting fuelwood, which can be hours a day, or the cost of procuring fuel, which can be a substantial portion of household income. Unfortunately, only a small share of stoves—liquified petroleum gas (LPG), electric, ethanol, natural gas/biogas/compressed natural gas, and the Mimi Moto biomass pellet gasifier—reduce smoke enough to substantially avoid negative health impacts.

Cookstoves are the fastest-growing project type on the voluntary carbon market and many distributors of efficient stoves rely on offsets to subsidize the cost of their stoves. Accurately and conservatively quantifying the climate benefits of efficient cookstoves matters tremendously. These carbon credits are being used by companies to meet emissions reduction targets and sell carbon-neutral products. If the credits do not represent real emissions reductions, they can take the place of true emissions reductions and justify ongoing emissions. They also can undermine trust in the market and its ability to support these projects going forward. 

In our journal article, Pervasive over-crediting from cookstove offset methodologies (open access version), published in Nature Sustainability in January 2024, we comprehensively, quantitatively, and systematically assess how well the five cookstove offset methodologies that have generated almost all cookstoves offset credits to date quantify the climate benefits of improved cookstove projects.

This website translates our study into clear, accessible explanations of how the methodologies work, summaries of our findings on credit quality and analysis by quantification factor, recommendations on how methodologies can be updated and current methodologies can be used to produce quality credits, and guidance for credit buyers, including our vetted list of quality cookstoves carbon credit projects.  

Methods for assessing offset quality

The high levels of over-crediting we found are not unique to cookstove projects, but are an example of a much bigger crisis of quality in the offset market. Other studies have found similarly high levels of over-crediting by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (e.g., Cames et al., 2016; Haya et al., 2010), improved forest management methodologies, and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) offset methodologies, among others (see our Repository of Article on Offset Quality).

Our journal article demonstrated how analysts can use an over/under-crediting analysis to systematically assess offset quality under different methodologies across all estimation factors for a project type. Further discussion of these methods are in our guidance on how to perform a comprehensive over/under crediting analysis of offset projects.

We release this guidance to show how cookstoves can be a rare high-quality offset project type that credit buyers can trust. 

On this website:

⇒ How the methodologies work
⇒ A summary of our study design and results 
⇒ Our findings by factor 
⇒ Recommendations for methodology changes and for developers of cookstoves offset projects
⇒ Guidance for buyers of cookstoves offset credits
⇒ Our vetted list of quality cookstoves offset projects
⇒ Information and resources on the health benefits from different stoves
⇒ News coverage on cookstove offset quality
⇒ Other key resources