GS11935 GS11934 RVPA-12 Promoting sustainable use of biomass energy resources in targeted communities

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard cookstove project in Nepal with VVB-verified additionality and a quantified 5% leakage deduction, but significant gaps in permanence protection (no buffer pool), an aggressive 100% usage-rate assumption, and a notable five-fold discrepancy in ERR figures between the PDD and validation report. The absence of any monitoring data, low extraction confidence, and a contradiction on FPIC status limit confidence in the project's long-term integrity and transparency.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠100% usage rate assumed in the validation report with no monitoring data to support it; the PDD lists a value of 1.0, creating a five-order-of-magnitude ambiguity that undermines claim reliability
• ⚠No buffer pool or permanence mechanism identified in any available document, leaving the project exposed to reversal risk from cookstove breakdown or replacement with inefficient alternatives
• ⚠FPIC status contradicts between two validation reports (conducted per 2023-11-30 report; not conducted per 2024-09-27 report), raising safeguards concerns
• ⚠ERR figures differ by a factor of five between the PDD (9,601 tCO2e) and the validation report (48,005 tCO2e); while this may reflect a per-year vs. lifetime basis, the discrepancy is not explicitly reconciled in the documents
• ⚠Low extraction confidence across the document set, meaning key data points may be incomplete or misread

Credit Vintages