UpEnergy-Social and Climate Impact Programme- Cooking Devices VPA-40

Audit Analysis

The UpEnergy cooking-device project in Malawi has a VVB-verified combined additionality test and recent baseline reassessment, but suffers from a notable permanence gap (no buffer pool, reversal events unaddressed) and a critical transparency shortfall (no verified ERR figure found in any document). The ERR claim appears conservative relative to an older monitoring report, and the 2025 verification and validation reports are recent, but the 2020 monitoring report and several null fields limit confidence in the overall data picture.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠No buffer pool is in place and reversal events are explicitly 'not addressed' in the verification report, leaving the project exposed to permanence risk if efficient stoves are replaced by traditional ones during the 5-year crediting period.
• ⚠Total verified ERR is not found in any available document, making it impossible to confirm whether the project is actually delivering the claimed 195,171 tCO₂e.
• ⚠The crediting period was shortened from 15 years (PDD, 2023) to 5 years (validation report, 2025) without a clear documented rationale in the extracted record.
• ⚠The only monitoring report in the record is dated October 2020, five years before the July 2025 verification report, creating a significant gap in the monitoring evidence chain.
• ⚠ERR figures differ between the 2020 monitoring report (261,248 tCO₂e) and the current ex-ante estimate (195,171 tCO₂e); while the current claim is lower (conservative), the unexplained ~25% reduction warrants clarification.

Credit Vintages