Why Atmos is advising against buying Cookstove Offsets?
Recent buzz around Cookstove projects paint a concerning picture. Today, we deep dive with our Beta AI co-pilot to examine faulty baselines and poor additionality. Cookstoves might dethrone REDD+ as worst projects to exist in VCM.
Update 2: On January 2024, researchers at UC Berkeley found certain Cookstove projects being over-credited by 9x. We are hopeful to see major researchers speaking against cookstove projects and their faulty baselines.
Update 1: Based on our revisited data from Verra in December 2023, Energy Demand and specifically Cookstove projects remained the single largest category of new projects. Now the projected offsets generated from faulty projects stands at over 240 million tCO2.
The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) has recently been abuzz with the increasing prominence of cookstoves. According to Verra, one of the leading registries in the VCM, almost half of the new projects proposed since 2022 have revolved around high-efficiency cookstoves. Based on our projections, developers stand to gain an estimated $2B over the average project lifespan of seven years.
Atmos is an AI for Climate Investments. We are building Level-1 Infrastructure to bring Carbon Offset markets online.
