Carbon Offsets - Solar Cooking

Solar cooking offers a completely clean and environmentally friendly method of cooking. Around the world, over 3 billion people are estimated to cook on an open fire. This is not only inefficient, but also contributes to deforestation and is a leading cause of indoor air pollution. Not only is solar cooking clean and emission free, but it saves household money that would have otherwise been spent on fuel. This allows the household to spend more of their income on essentials, clothing, food, medicine, education and more.

Solar cooking carbon offset credits are available to the Gold Standard and Verified Carbon Standard carbon offset schemes.

Gold Standard – Solar Cooking To Support Refugees

The solar cooking for refugees carbon offset project is a Gold Standard project. The project has distributed around 50,000 smoke free solar cookers across six refugee camps in Darfur.

The CooKit solar cookers vastly improve the livelihoods of refugees. One of the main social benefits of providing solar cooking equipment is the safety of not having to leave the refugee camp to collect increasingly scarce firewood. This task typically falls to women, who would fear for their safety when leaving the refugee camp to collect fuel.

This project provides refugees with the necessary knowledge, materials and training to make their own solar cooking equipment. Due to the climate in middle Africa, the solar cookers can be used for ~330 days per year.

Benefits of these Gold Standard Carbon Credits

There are many wider social, environmental and economic benefits for this project. These include:

• Female empowerment: Improved safety and saving time
• Clean and smoke free cooking: No use of dirty fuels and no smoke produced in the cooking process
• Improved health: Indoor smoke from cooking has been estimated by the  WHO to be responsible for 1.9 million deaths in Africa each and every year
• Reduces conflict: Firewood in the region is increasingly scarce. Avoiding the need of the local wood resource, avoids conflict with the local population
• Reduced deforestation: More than 50% of the local vegetation saved
• Supports education for children

Video: Solar Cooking for Refugees

Benefits Against UN Sustainable Development Goals

This Gold Standard carbon offset project, solar cooking for refugees is aligned with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals:

• UN SDG 1 – No Poverty
• UN SDG 3 – Good health and well-being
• UN SDG 5 – Gender equality
• UN SDG 7 – Affordable and clean energy
• UN SDG 8 – Decent work and economic growth
• UN SDG 13 – Climate action
• UN SDG 16 – Peace, justice and strong institutions

Verified Carbon Standard Carbon Credits – Solar Cooking in Asia

This project is installing 49,000 solar cookers for a rural population. The project is located on the rural area of Ganzhou District of Zhangye, Gansu province in northwestern China.

The solar cookers provide invaluable equipment to local and remote residents. The rating power of each cooker is 910 W. The project aims to deliver a total capacity of 44.59 MW.

The project enables the rural residents to efficiently substitute solar energy for fossil fuel, or more specifically coal. Coal is one of the most carbon intensive fuel sources around. The cookers can be used in daily cooking and water boiling, avoiding greenhouse gas emission that would be generated by fossil fuel consumption.

This project is a verified carbon credit, under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) carbon offset scheme. VCS is the world’s largest carbon offset scheme and is well regarded.

Where to Buy Carbon Offsets

Circular Ecology can provide carbon offsets to businesses, using carbon credits from Gold Standard, Verified Carbon Standard or Plan Vivo. We have carbon offset registry accounts for all three of those well respected offset certification schemes. For volumes over 500 tCO2e, please contact us at Circular Ecology.

To offset your carbon now, please see our store:

Further Information

If you would like to discuss carbon offsets, please contact us.