What is a “meal”? Comparative methods of auditing carbon offset compliance for fuel-efficient cookstoves

Abstract

Smoke from inefficient biomass cookstoves contributes to global climate change and kills approximately four million people per year. Credits for reduced carbon emissions can potentially subsidize fuel-efficient cookstoves that reduce these harmful effects. Understanding the accuracy of different methods of monitoring stove usage is useful to measure the effects of cookstove programs and to target carbon credits. This paper compares four methods of measuring stove usage: hours cooked (derived from a predictive logistic regression of stove usage monitors and observations of stoves in use); number of people cooked for reported in household food diaries; fuel weight used gathered in a kitchen performance test; and household air pollution using mean 24-hour concentrations of particulate matter collected with particulate air monitors. We find statistically significant positive correlations between five out of six of these pairs of measures. While the correlations are positive, the explanatory power of each measure for another is weak. The weak correlations emphasize the importance of using multiple measures to track changes in stove use for both researchers and carbon auditors.