Paradigm Healthy Cookstove and Water Treatment Project

Audit Analysis

The Paradigm Healthy Cookstove and Water Treatment Project has confirmed additionality and basic safeguards in place, but is undermined by a 0% leakage deduction despite documented space-heating concerns, a 100% usage assumption versus a 64% verified rate, a non-conservative NRB value, and over 30 corrective actions indicating systemic monitoring and data-quality weaknesses. The project delivered roughly 116% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the monitored year, so over-crediting is modest, but the underlying assumptions carry meaningful risk.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Usage rate assumed at 100% in the PDD but verified at only 64.06% in the 2015 monitoring report — a 36-percentage-point gap that inflates baseline emissions avoided.
• ⚠Leakage deduction of 0% despite material findings identifying space-heating use of stoves in the wet season and potential NRB-fraction leakage for water treatment; the verification report (2014) labels leakage as 'quantified' while the 2013 monitoring report calls it 'deemed negligible.'
• ⚠NRB value of 0.94 (CDM methodology) is materially less conservative than the 0.65 used in comparable Gold Standard Kenya projects, and Gold Standard acceptance of the CDM-based calculation was still pending at verification.
• ⚠Over 30 corrective actions were required across verification cycles, including missing quarterly cross-checks, incomplete water-quality testing, surveyor data-entry errors, and inconsistencies between the monitoring report and PDD on emission factors and cluster definitions.
• ⚠FNRB value contradicts between documents: 82.14 (national default, verification report 2011) versus 92.0 (local field, monitoring report 2017), and the method itself is inconsistent (national_default vs local_field).

Credit Vintages