Community Carbon Efficient Cooking Programme-VPA 17

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard efficient-cooking project in Uganda with a VVB-confirmed combined additionality test and recent baseline reassessment, but undermined by a 52% gap between claimed and verified emission reductions, the absence of any documented buffer pool or permanence mechanism, and multiple contradictions between the verification report, monitoring report, and PDD appendix. The project's safeguards (FPIC, grievance mechanism, benefit sharing) are well documented, but data-reliability issues and an unaddressed reversal-risk assessment limit confidence in the credit claims.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠VVB verified only 178,796 tCO2e against 342,758 tCO2e claimed in the monitoring report — a 52% shortfall that signals significant over-claiming in the project's own monitoring
• ⚠No buffer pool or permanence mechanism is documented in any available record, and the verification report does not explicitly address reversal risk
• ⚠Monitoring method is contradictory: the verification report cites smart-meter data while the monitoring report describes an annual survey, raising questions about the underlying data quality
• ⚠Crediting period is stated as 2023-03 to 2026-02 in the verification report but 2026-01 to 2030-12 in the validation report, creating ambiguity about the project's actual duration
• ⚠Leakage deduction is 0% with a 'quantified' justification in the verification report, yet the PDD appendix describes it as 'deemed negligible' — an inconsistency that weakens the leakage treatment

Credit Vintages