Promoting Clean Cooking Solutions for the Disadvantaged Households

Audit Analysis

A Gold Standard improved-cookstove project in Nepal with a confirmed additionality test and quantified 5% leakage deduction, but undermined by the absence of a buffer pool, an aggressive 100% usage-rate assumption, and a verification report listing over 30 corrective actions that include past emission-reduction calculation errors and missing monitoring parameters. The project delivered roughly 84% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the 2024 monitoring year, which is conservative, yet the volume of documentation deficiencies and cross-document contradictions (fNRB units, monitoring method, grievance mechanism) erode confidence in the MRV chain.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Over 30 corrective actions in the 2024 verification report, including explicit calculation errors in the emission-reduction worksheet for 2019 and 2020 periods, missing monitoring parameters (commissioned devices, continued-use adjustment, lifespan), and inconsistencies in ICS numbers and methodology linkage
• ⚠Usage rate assumed at 100% in the ex-ante estimate while the verified rate is 94.67%, and the VVB specifically questioned how all 29,109 cookstoves could claim a full year of reductions
• ⚠fNRB method changed from local field measurement (2021 verification) to national default (2024 verification) without a clear documented justification in the extracted record
• ⚠FPIC was not conducted despite the project targeting disadvantaged households

Credit Vintages