UN extends consultation on new cleaner cookstoves metrics

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – The UN’s climate change arm said it has reopened a stakeholder consultation on proposals to improve the calculation of a key metric that is used as the basis to claim carbon credits from cleaner cookstoves.

A call for input from stakeholders was initially opened for the dates 13 October to 11 November following recommendations from the UN climate arm’s methodologies panel for a much more conservative approach, following years of controversy that some cookstove projects are being massively overcredited.

Part of the reason for the reopened consultation is to give stakeholders the chance to give their opinion on an ‘improved commenting table’, the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said in an update on its website.

In October last year, the methodologies panel proposed a new method to calculate the fraction of non-renewable biomass (fNRB), which relates to a measurement of the volume of firewood collection above what can be sustainably harvested.

These proposals include the use of draft national fNRB default values for Sub-Saharan Africa based on new statistical modelling by Yale University researchers, and the peer-reviewed analysis and data tool known as “MoFUSS”.

As a result, sub-national fNRB estimates would be made available for the first time.

According to assessments from the UN panel, various ratings agencies and researchers - and some project developers themselves – many cookstoves projects have applied an excessively high assumption (i.e the least conservative) for fNRB through the use of outdated baselines drawn up for the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.

In response to the MP’s initial stakeholder consultation last autumn, a group of project developers in the cleaner cookstoves sector called for greater ‘peer review’ of data and assumptions in the proposals for a much more conservative metric.

Some developers said off the record the proposed metrics would make projects uneconomic in some African countries such as Madagascar, thus cutting the flow of finance.

The latest stakeholder consultation will be open until 31 January, with the cleaner cookstoves sector expected to have greater political priority this year at the behest of various African governments, development banks and the International Energy Agency, with a meeting planned later this year on how to free up more finance.

Cookstoves projects that employ old or the least conservative methodologies are expected to be hit hard by new assessment criteria from voluntary carbon market integrity initiatives that take effect later in the year.

Source from https://www.qcintel.com/