Clean Cooking Solutions for Rural Nepal

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard improved-cookstove project in rural Nepal with a VVB-confirmed additionality assessment, a quantified 5% leakage deduction, and conservative emission-reduction figures that fall below the PDD's lifetime expectation. However, the absence of a buffer pool, the fact that reversal events are not addressed, and a contradiction between the verification report and the PDD on whether FPIC was conducted create meaningful integrity and safeguards concerns. The project is functional and transparent but carries moderate permanence and data-reliability risk.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠No buffer pool is stated in any available document, and reversal events are explicitly marked as not addressed — a significant gap for a cookstove project where stoves can break, be abandoned, or be replaced with traditional stoves.
• ⚠The verification report (Aug 2021) confirms FPIC was conducted, but the PDD (Jun 2023) records it as not conducted — an unresolved contradiction on a core safeguard.
• ⚠The validation report (Feb 2024) lists a second crediting period (Oct 2023 – Oct 2028) while the verification report covers the first period (Oct 2018 – Oct 2023); the relationship between the two periods and whether the project has been re-validated is unclear from the extracted record.
• ⚠Four cookstoves (3 mud, 1 metallic) were found non-operational and two more intermittently operational during the monitoring survey, yet no buffer or reversal mechanism is documented to cover these losses.

Credit Vintages