Biogas Support Program – Nepal Activity-4

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard biogas project in Nepal with VVB-confirmed additionality and a quantified 5% leakage deduction, but undermined by multiple material findings, a missing buffer pool, unresolved reversal-event documentation, and significant data inconsistencies across the verification, monitoring, and validation reports. The project's claims are moderately conservative (verified usage rate well below the assumed rate), yet the volume of corrective actions and the crediting-period contradiction raise meaningful reliability concerns.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Eight or more corrective actions and compliance-level findings were raised in the verification report, including missing double-counting declaration, missing OFN/ODA support documents, and incorrect labelling of leakage emissions as project emissions.
• ⚠The fNRB value was held fixed for the entire crediting period, which the verification report flags as contrary to Gold Standard Tool 30 expiry rules.
• ⚠Reversal events are marked as 'not addressed' in the verification report, and no buffer pool percentage is stated in any available document.
• ⚠The crediting period differs between the verification report (Dec 2018 – Dec 2025) and the validation report (Dec 2023 – Dec 2028), creating ambiguity about which period the 2022 monitoring data belongs to.
• ⚠A non-operational digester (BCE 00043) was observed due to sale of a buffalo, and the accounting treatment for such abandonment is not clarified in the ERR estimation.

Credit Vintages