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Carbon Finance for Healthy Kitchens by Adam Harvey
Major funding of large-scale and small-scale projects disseminating improved stoves and kitchen practices is likely to be available from the “carbon market” within the next few months. To date funding has been very limited. The major obstacles have been:
The second obstacle is perhaps the most difficult of the four to overcome. In principle it is acceptable that an efficient wood or charcoal stove reduces GHG by reducing the amount of CO2 emitted, in cases where there is insufficient re-growth of biomass in the area from which the fuel was extracted. If there are not enough trees growing in the collection area, the CO2 from the stove is not absorbed, and it becomes a green house gas. The difficulty is to turn this principle into practice, since it implies that increments in tree size must be measured, alongside measurements of removal of tree mass. The “renewability status” of any piece of wood burning in the stove will be a fraction, the increment divided by the removal. If the increment exceeds or equals the removal, the stick of wood in the fire will be 100% renewable; if it is less, the stick of wood will be partially non-renewable and partially renewable. If there were no growth at all in the collection area, the firewood would be 100% non-renewable; this is an unlikely situation since the presence of firewood extracted from an area implies that some wood is growing (to be 100% non-renewable it must be the last root extracted).
It was also suggested that non-renewability of biomass (NRB) could be identified simply as the inverse of renewability of biomass (RB) as defined under the current CDM rules. Some stove projects have been validated on this basis. This approach implies that firewood is either 100% renewable or 100% non-renewable, a useful simplification that encourages people to use carbon finance to fund large-scale dissemination of fire-wood conserving stoves. Under this approach, stoves burning wood in an area where the ratio of increment/removal is, say, 66%, would have all their CO2 emissions counted as green-house gas, rather than one third. Although this is a reasonable approach in some ways, it does not track a progressive transition from NRB to RB which is useful in the interests of sustainability; and since several measures aimed at increasing the sustainability of biomass in practice occur alongside each other it leads to a risk of over-estimation of emission reductions. Consequently it has been proposed[2] that wood-fuels are described in terms of their increment/removal ratio, so that applications for carbon credits from improved stove programmes claim only the portion of CO2 not absorbed by re-growth. In the example above, only one third of the CO2 emitted by the stoves would count as GHG emissions and the carbon finance available would then be less than that claimed under the previous (“100% or zero”) approach. One advantage of the fractional approach is that it can be conservative: in cases where it is very difficult to measure the annual increment and removal, there is almost always enough evidence (derived from forestry studies, energy census data, and so on) to establish what the maximum possible renewability fraction is, and this figure can be used to ensure that emissions reductions are not over-estimated. A key further advantage is that it complements co-ordinated efforts toward management of forestry resources and the tracking and grading of sustainability. The question of how to improve the quality of data to derive accurate estimates of non-renewability still remains. In this context relevant work has been done[3], which combines satellite imagery with studies and census data to identify areas of critical non-renewability – this promises to become a powerful tool for carbon finance baselines and monitoring. The current absence of a CDM-style methodology has proved a difficulty in the sense that the quality of voluntary market carbon credits needs to be strengthened, if the full potential of VERs are to be realized. A strong voluntary market promises to:
This extremely onerous requirement is actually a necessity if we are to achieve our vision of healthy kitchens for all. Without quality control and quality assurance mechanisms it is unlikely improved stoves will ever make a serious impact or become main-stream. The monitoring requirement of carbon finance introduces a major quality assurance element into cook-stove programmes. It is also usually the case that the level of finance available, at current market prices for VERs, is sufficient to cover the cost of these extensive monitoring and quality assurance operations. The second strength of carbon finance is closely related to the first; it is that the finance is paid after delivery of the measured output. As many people who have worked long years on sustainability and poverty-alleviation know, this is the missing link of development; that outputs are rewarded rather than inputs financed. Having said this, carbon finance is also a source of the advance capital needed to prepare a large-scale programme. For example, Pioneer Carbon can be approached for advance capital, which is paid back over the first few years of the programme in the form of emission reductions verified and assistance in preparing carbon finance documents – Pioneer will also provide all the assistance needed to apply the voluntary market cook-stove methodology, prepare relevant documents and design a robust project. With the help of this recent work on the key tools for monitoring, and the help of tools such as the WISDOM analysis for NRB assessment, combined with a general protocol in the form of the Pioneer methodology, the challenge of high quality large-scale stove programmes can be met through the Voluntary carbon market. [top] [end]Notes and References
[top] [end]Download the original article Carbon Finance for Healthy Kitchens by Adam Harvey (415 KB)[top] [end]Contents: Boiling Point 54 - Climate change and household energy
Categories: Boiling Point 54| Climate Change | ||||||||||
Page created:
02 February 2008; Last edited:
03 February 2008; Version: 0 | ||||||||||
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