Clean cooking carbon credits

How clean cooking credits work

Around a third of the world’s population cooks on open fires or basic stoves burning wood or charcoal. An efficient stove, a solar cooker or a switch to a cleaner fuel uses far less fuel, so less wood is cut and less CO₂ and black carbon are released. The credit represents the emissions avoided compared with the household’s previous cooking, measured over the monitoring period.

These projects deliver some of the strongest co-benefits of any credit: fewer respiratory illnesses from indoor smoke, hours saved collecting fuel, lower household fuel costs and reduced pressure on local forests. That is why they are common under Gold Standard and often carry several Sustainable Development Goals.

Evidence to check

Clean cooking credits are only as good as the data behind two numbers: how much fuel is really saved, and how much of that fuel would otherwise have been unsustainably harvested.

• Stove usage: whether the project monitors that stoves are actually in use, ideally with usage sensors or regular surveys, not only the number distributed.
• Baseline fuel consumption: whether it is measured in households through kitchen performance tests rather than assumed.
• Fraction of non-renewable biomass: the share of wood that would not have regrown. Over-estimating it has been the main source of over-crediting in this sector, so look for conservative, recent values.
• Stove lifetime and replacement: how the project handles broken or abandoned stoves.
• Co-benefits: whether health, time and gender impacts are verified, not just claimed.

What affects the price

Clean cooking and safe water credits on this marketplace are typically priced between the cheapest renewable energy credits and the more expensive nature-based projects. Projects with metered monitoring, verified health benefits or the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles label cost more. Prices exclude VAT and include retirement, certificate and payment fees. Applicable VAT is added at checkout. Sign in to see live prices.

How to read the CRISP rating

CRISP, the Carbon Ratings Insight Platform, reviews each project’s design document, verification and monitoring reports, scores five criteria out of 5 with a written justification for each, and averages them into the overall rating you see on every project card. More than 1,800 projects are rated and the ratings are free to read.

• Additionality: would the reductions have happened anyway? CRISP looks for regulatory surplus, financial need for the credit revenue, activities that are not common practice, and a credible baseline.
• Permanence: how long the benefit lasts and how reversal risk is managed, through monitoring, buffer pools or insurance and long-term project commitments.
• Quantification: whether the reductions are measured with robust methods, a clear baseline, systematic monitoring, independent verification and transparent reporting.
• Leakage: whether emissions simply shift outside the project boundary, and whether that is monitored and deducted from the credits.
• ICVCM CCP status: 1 if the methodology has not been submitted or failed assessment, 3 if submitted and pending, 5 if approved under the Core Carbon Principles.