A Ghanaian project to use faster- cooking stoves that burn less fuel has been given its first batch of voluntary carbon credits, according to ClimateCare. The project, started five years ago, has so far delivered 287,000 Gyapa stoves and avoided the release of about a quarter of a million tons of carbon dioxide, Edward Hanrahan, a founder and director of ClimateCare, an emissions project developer, said by telephone. Replacing traditional wood-burning fires with cleaner stoves may help fight climate change and reduce poverty by lowering cooking costs. About 2.7 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, do not have access to clean cooking facilities, according to the International Energy Agency. Traditional methods can aggravate respiratory diseases and contribute toward 1.5 million premature deaths a year from indoor air pollution, the IEA’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol said in an October interview. “ClimateCare helped open up carbon funding to cook stoves and we believe this is just the start of what we can achieve in tackling climate change and poverty together through intelligent carbon and development finance,” Hanrahan said in a statement. Oxford, England-based ClimateCare, which was taken private in August after a management buyout from JPMorgan Chase & Co., said it worked with Enterprise Works, a not-for-profit group based in Washington, D.C., to develop the project. The CO2 avoided is awarded with so-called Gold Standard carbon credits, a voluntary offset standard that emphasizes sustainable development. The carbon credits were delivered to ClimateCare on Feb. 3 from The Gold Standard Foundation. It’s the largest single delivery of its kind, according to an e-mailed statement from the company.
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