Ecostove - Guardian Policy

Project Cycle

Inspiration

Clean cooking initiatives are crucial to improving public health and reducing harmful emissions. According to Gold Standard, 3 billion people lack access to clean cooking, leading to around 4 million premature deaths annually. Improved cookstove projects financed through carbon credits can provide clean cooking access, reduce emissions, and promote sustainable development. By supporting these projects, we can make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions while combating climate change.

A typical project developer is faced with a choice of multiple methodologies provided by global standards like Verra, GS, CDM to calculate their project emissions and claim the credits for the same. Recently, a striking report by The Guardian media group exposed the flaws in Verra's REDD+ scheme leading them to phase out their methodologies. Such exposures dwindle the stakeholder's sentiment in the carbon markets and hence it is extremely important to build and choose right methodology for carbon projects.

I did the academic research and figured which policy is best for executing cookstove projects on ground. I've linked the research paper in project documentation on Github. Gold standard's ME&MD methodology directly monitors fuel usage and connects a measuring device to cookstove. This approach is more precise than traditional methodologies, which rely on more generalized assumptions or estimates to calculate emissions reductions. It also places a strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement and the inclusion of local communities in the project development and monitoring process.

This Guardian policy, is a reflection of same methodology according to the Gold standard's typical project lifecycle.

What it does

Latest version of Guardian provides a policy for improved cookstoves. This new Guardian policy builds on top of it to make it more robust, aligned to industry and future-proof.

Here's detailed documentation on how this policy works and step by step breakdown - Github://gautamp8/guardian YouTube video with presentation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOQpLmbW0hA

Challenges we ran into

Building policies on Guardian requires a unique skillset of carbon offset world and programming. It was a challenging process to connect the blocks together and get used to the workflow builder UI.
Managed guardian service had several bugs(policy export feature broken, request entity too large error for complex policies) which I actively reported to the maintainers. Good support by Envision team allowed me to execute this project.