Good afternoon. This week brings news about two carbon credits projects in Mozambique, one of which promises big results, and the other of which did promise them but failed to deliver. With the help of Zitamar News contributor Tavares Cebola, an investigation by the American newspaper The Washington Post found detailed evidence for the failure of a project to install cooking stoves in Mozambican households in a bid to reduce carbon emissions and thus generate carbon credits, which were then sold for profit. The investigation found that the vast majority of households surveyed were no longer using the crude stoves, because they were either too prone to breaking or generated too much smoke. The company behind the project, C-Quest, claims that the village surveyed by the newspaper was an outlier. And yet it has admitted that some 175,000 stoves it installed are not in use. But the carbon credits from those stoves have already been claimed, apparently without verifying whether the right amount of carbon has actually been saved.
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Carbon credits offer the promise of providing a major boost to Mozambique’s economy. Like many African countries, its carbon emissions are relatively low for its size, and it is also home to extensive mangrove forests, which according to the news service Bloomberg absorb as much as ten times as much carbon as other trees. But measuring and auditing the true carbon impact of these projects has long been a problem, and on the evidence of this story, it continues to be.
