BioLite Improved Cook stoves Programme - CPA 021 supported by Republic of Korea

Audit Analysis

The BioLite improved cookstoves project in Uganda has a verified additionality assessment and a quantified 5% leakage deduction, but suffers from significant data reliability issues including a near-100× discrepancy in the fuel-not-replaced-by-baseline value across documents, a 4× gap in claimed ERR figures, and a 5-year vs 20-year crediting period conflict. No buffer pool or permanence mechanism is in place, and reversal risk is unaddressed. The project delivered roughly 62% of its pro-rata expected emissions reductions for the 2023 monitoring period, indicating moderate under-delivery.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠FNRB value differs by a factor of ~97 between the verification report (0.807) and the PDD (78.75), raising serious questions about the credit calculation basis
• ⚠Total ERR claimed is 1,498,873 in the PDD but 2,649,011 in the issuance document — a 77% gap that is unexplained
• ⚠Crediting period is stated as 5 years (2019–2024) in the verification report but 20 years (2018–2038) in the validation report
• ⚠No buffer pool or permanence mechanism is documented, and reversal events are explicitly not addressed
• ⚠Eight corrective action requests were raised during validation, indicating material documentation gaps at the design stage

Credit Vintages