Improved cookstove program in Bangladesh supported by the Republic of Korea-CPA 03

Audit Analysis

This Gold Standard cookstove project in Bangladesh has a VVB-verified additionality assessment and no reported reversal events, but is undermined by an extensive list of material findings and corrective action requests, numerous contradictions between the verification report, monitoring report, and PDD (particularly on leakage treatment, fNRB method, and lifetime ERR estimates), and a project-specific baseline with no documented reassessment. The sheer volume of unresolved documentation and calculation issues (including a CAR on the efficiency parameter) raises meaningful concerns about the robustness of the credit claims.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠28 material findings and 40+ corrective action requests identified by the VVB, including a CAR on the efficiency parameter (eta_new applied as 0.34 without accounting for the 34.62% Two-pot Bondhu Chulha efficiency)
• ⚠Contradiction on leakage: verification report states 0% deduction (deemed negligible) while the monitoring report applies a 5% quantified deduction
• ⚠Lifetime ex-ante ERR differs by a factor of 2.5 between the PDD (27.1 million tCO2e) and the monitoring report (10.8 million tCO2e), creating ambiguity in the pro-rata delivery check
• ⚠FPIC status contradicts between the validation report (conducted) and the verification report (not conducted)

Credit Vintages