The Impact Of Our Carbon Credits
The Impact Of Our Carbon Credits
At LOVESPACE, we are offsetting our emissions as part of our sustainability commitment. Offsetting simply means compensating for our greenhouse gas emissions. We do this through funding projects that generate carbon credits. This article will explore how we get those carbon credits and how they help us with our initiatives of reducing our carbon footprint.
One of the projects we’ve been funding is a community-based project in Uganda. This project provides cookstoves to the local communities, lowering their cooking emissions along with a host of other benefits for the families involved.
Additional Benefits
- Less deforestation to source fuel per family.
- Less time spent collecting fuel or working to pay for it.
- Less smoke released by the burning of fuel meaning lower exposure to harmful gases and better health outcomes for families using the stoves.
Improved cookstove, used by a stove recipient from the project we’re funding
Where Did The Money Go?
We purchased 251 credits for this project in 2023, to compensate for our 2022 emissions. In addition to funding the purchase and distribution of the energy-efficient cookstoves, funds from carbon credits pay for regular third-party monitoring of the project to make sure stoves are still being used by recipients.
The project crediting period ran from Jul 10, 2017 ― Jul 09, 2022, generating around 39,012 credits per year which could then be purchased by companies like us. In simple terms, this means the cost of the stove is shared by the first 5 years of impact.
How Do Efficient Cookstoves Help The Planet?
An efficient stove design helps reduce the combustion of woody biomass in meeting a family’s cooking needs. Less fuel burned correlates to lower greenhouse gas emissions, reducing their contribution to global warming.
The reason why we invested into this project is because it not only brings a positive impact to our environment, but also helped improve the lives of stove recipients, through the health and financial benefits mentioned previously.
How Many Stoves Did We Fund?
We have funded stoves for around 231 families for a year, using calculations from the last year of the project.
In more detail, in 2017, when their project started, it distributed 25,600 stoves to families in the Buikve, Mukono and Kayunga districts. For 5 years, the impact of these stoves were monitored and reported, creating carbon credits. There is a slight reduction in impact per stove over the years due to the project's estimate that the stoves will lose some efficiency, for instance, because of wear and tear or user behaviour.
How Much Woody Biomass Did We Save?
The project estimated that families were using 2.35 tonnes of wood per year before implementation, and that the project resulted in an average saving of 88% reduction in woody biomass use. We calculated our impact to be around 332.6 tonnes2.
Continued Benefits
Despite our investments into this project only covering a set amount of stove implementations, the families with improved cooking systems can continue to use these stoves long-term and enjoy a more convenient and eco-friendly lifestyle.
Read more about our climate impact and the projects that we fund on our impact dashboard.
Footnotes:
1. Each stove resulted in 0.96 Voluntary Emissions Reductions (VERs) after leakage in 2022. VERs are carbon credits available on voluntary carbon markets, each representing the reduction or removal of 1 tonne of CO2e emissions.
2. If we look at the monitoring surveys from the final two years, we get an average saving of 1.465 tonnes of woody biomass per stove per year.
Monitoring period from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021:
1.49 tonne woody biomass per stove saved per year
Monitoring period from April 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022:
1.44 tonne woody biomass per stove saved per year