BURN reposted this
There is currently a chicken and egg problem with cookstove carbon credits. Buyers don't want to buy because of low-quality credits, and project developers can't afford to build high-quality projects because no one is buying them. Buyers can solve this problem by, as Mr. Scott says, committing to buy high quality credits today.
The key to creating a cookstove sector that generates high-quality credits is to make commitments to buy high-quality credits today. There are many players, BURN included, that offer ‘forward sales’ contracts on future MMECD and dMRV credits. Commitments to buy these credits will cause billions of dollars of new investment to flow, with the knowledge that there is a committed off-taker on the other side. Over 900 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to clean cooking. The reliance on inefficient stoves and open fires bankrupt families, destroy forests, and increase indoor air pollution, leading to the death of 600,000 people, mostly women and children, every year. The outlook is equally grim. In Africa, unlike every other region of the world, the number of people relying on traditional biomass stoves is projected to grow, reaching 1.67 billion by 2050. I’ve been working in the clean cooking sector for the last 28 years - the last 14 as CEO/Founder of BURN – and up until a few years ago it seemed that this crisis couldn’t be solved, at least not at scale. Then suddenly, everything changed. With carbon credits - and carbon credit pre-financing - we could finally bring a clean cooking appliance to every household on the continent, by discounting the cost of a stove to a customer by 60-100%. In the last 18 months, BURN has provided ~$60 million of such discounts, allowing families to access lifesaving technology that would otherwise have been unattainable. In the next 18 months, we expect to provide an additional $110 Million in discounts. (In fact, more is possible as we have built the manufacturing and home delivery infrastructure across the continent to utilize $250 Million of carbon finance each year). Today, BURN leverages carbon finance to bring a range of clean cooking appliances including electric, LPG, and biomass stoves to 10 countries in Africa and growing. We use it to bring induction cooking to the 600 million people who currently have access to electricity, helping them make the leap from charcoal to electric cooking on Africa’s mostly renewable-powered grid. At the same time, we use it to bring our best-in-class wood stove to the ~700 million rural people in Africa who rely on firewood and can’t afford purchased fuels such as LPG, electricity, ethanol, or pellets. Carbon credits are not a ‘nice-to-have’. They are a matter of life or death, quite literally for the 600,000 women and children who might still die this year because they could not access a clean cooking appliance. https://lnkd.in/eUAZ-ShP
