Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027335
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
WOOD BURNING STOVES
How one company’s plan to help the planet went off the rails ... C-Quest Capital claimed it could improve people’s lives in Africa
WOOD BURNING STOVES
How one company’s plan to help the planet went off the rails ... C-Quest Capital claimed it could improve people’s lives in Africa
Lucinda Gueterro, 53, cooks outside her home in the Sansão Muthemba neighborhood of Tete, Mozambique. Her stove from C-Quest was damaged by rain, so she now cooks outside with the same methods as before. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/24/carbon-credits-cook-stoves-africa/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
My adult life started in 1960 ... more than 60 years ago.
Looking back, there has been an enormous amount of 'sloppiness' in decision making during this time ... and to some extent this article describes an example of this sloppiness.
I did some 'development' work in Mozambique during the 1980s and 1990s during which time there was considerable ethnic violence. Looking back, the end of the 'colonial era' was handled very badly and rather little seems to have been written about 'why?'. There has been plenty of criticism of the colonial era, but my impression is that there has been rather less criticism of the appalling performance of many countries in the 'post-colonial' period.
Peter Burgess
Pedro Marizane Juga, the community chief. He calls the area a “poor place.” Even in his office, there is an AC unit. But the community can't afford to pay the bills to run it. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
In recent years, advocates have touted the carbon credit market as the best hope to address an insidious aspect of poverty: how people cook. Though health and environmental experts had long warned about the risks posed by cooking over open fire — it leads to millions of premature deaths and is responsible for 2 percent of global emissions — funding to address the problem had been meager until the past decade, when carbon credits started to take off.
Africa, where nearly 4 in 5 households prepare meals over open flame, has been a focal point of these kinds of cookstove projects. C-Quest has been one of the largest players, distributing thousands of stoves per day across sub-Saharan Africa.
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The climate shell game
Carbon credits are financial commodities that allow companies, governments and other organizations to compensate for their climate pollution by investing in projects that reduce or eliminate emissions elsewhere. The demand for these credits has fueled a multibillion-dollar marketplace. But questionable claims and absent oversight threaten their potential as an urgently needed tool to curb climate change. End of carousel
The Post’s investigation included visits to more than 50 households in Mozambique, a review of project documents, and interviews with village leaders, stove experts, and dozens in the carbon credit industry familiar with C-Quest’s operations.
When The Post in April told C-Quest of its Mozambique findings, company officials said the area was an outlier and a “bad example” of the company’s work — something they still say.
But in June, C-Quest made a startling public disclosure. The company said a new management team had uncovered acts of “wrongdoing” by its former CEO, who’d stepped down several months earlier. The company did not provide specifics but said the over-issuance of “millions” of carbon credits had “resulted” from former head Ken Newcombe’s actions.
C-Quest has reported the alleged wrongdoing to U.S. federal law enforcement and an outside organization, Verra, that certifies carbon credit projects. C-Quest says it will cancel the over-issued credits, and Verra has said it is suspending 27 cookstove projects, including the one in Mozambique.
C-Quest says it will make a “clean break from past practices.”
Dolca Celestino cooks an evening meal of spaghetti for her family at her home. Celestino was one of the few women The Post found to be using the C-Quest stove. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
Metal components of a TLC-CQC rocket stove — C-Quest’s flagship stove in Africa — less than three years after being distributed. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post) A spokesman for Newcombe released a statement denying wrongdoing, saying the accusations against him are part of a private equity scheme “to discredit Dr. Newcombe and blame him for the very issues he had been working to fix and prevent from recurring.”
Newcombe, who worked previously at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, is widely seen as one of the pioneers of the voluntary carbon market. The statement said he had “prioritized integrity and long-term impact on the climate and the rural poor.”
The disclosures have ignited an ugly feud between C-Quest’s new and old management and have sent ripples through the multibillion-dollar world of carbon offsets, which has already been undermined by repeated scandals. This includes one recently exposed by The Post, involving forest preservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon.
Documents from Verra, the certifying body, list the Australia-based finance group Macquarie and the accounting firm PwC among the companies that have used C-Quest credits from projects now suspended. On its website, C-Quest has touted past investments from oil giant Shell, as well as a deal with BP. In some instances, the names of purchasers are made public only once they have redeemed credits — cashing them in to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions — leading to an incomplete picture of C-Quest’s clients.
Macquarie, PwC and BP declined to comment.
Shell, in a statement, said that it holds a “small number” of C-Quest credits and that they have been fenced off “so they cannot be retired or traded until we can be assured of their integrity.”
The C-Quest saga illustrates some of the shortcomings that endanger the unregulated carbon credit system, according to interviews with dozens in the industry. Companies voluntarily buy and sell carbon credits worldwide, with little or no transparency. Those selling the credits have significant leeway in how they estimate the emissions savings.
The market’s credibility hinges on the stated environmental benefits being real. The projects — especially with cookstoves — take place in rural, hard-to-reach areas, making it harder for outsiders to verify what is happening. And companies that closely scrutinize their own results might wind up with fewer credits to sell.
The incentives create a “race to the bottom,” said Danny Wilson, a University of California at Berkeley researcher and the CEO of Geocene, a cookstove sensor company. “The most cynical way to think about it is, as long as I shove a stove into a lady’s house, I’m going to get the carbon credit.”
Cookstoves with big caveats
A single document made it possible to vet C-Quest’s claims in Mozambique. It had been made public in error, posted to the Verra site.
It was a spreadsheet showing the names, cellphone numbers and GPS coordinates of thousands of stove recipients. That document spanned 16,131 names, in dozens of Mozambican towns and villages. Nearly a quarter of those people were in Sansão Muthemba, a warren of mud and unfinished concrete homes on the outskirts of a coal mining town. (Verra says the documents had not been marked by C-Quest as sensitive or confidential and were uploaded to the registry. They have since been removed.)
As Post reporters in March walked four to six miles daily over three days, passing the homes of hundreds of stove recipients, it was hard to find anybody still using the devices. People were cooking much as they had before the project launched: with charcoal or three-stone fires, outdoors. One C-Quest stove, its clay exterior brittle and chipping apart, held a medicine bottle, a safety pin and a peanut. Most people still possessed the plastic cards with QR codes they’d been given when registering for the project.
The distributed stoves aimed to improve on traditional cooking methods by offering a contained space that could more efficiently direct hot gases and promote air flow. The stove consisted of just a few components: stacked clay bricks, some mortar and three pieces of metal — with two of those pieces resting atop the stove, holding the pot and channeling the heat.
But in interviews with 52 people whose names matched those on the spreadsheet, 39 said the stove no longer worked or existed. They described a similar problem: The stove’s clay bricks couldn’t hold up to the rain.
C-Quest says it tells recipients to place stoves in well-ventilated, covered spaces or to construct “half kitchens” — small, roofed huts that are open on the sides. But few had done this. And several described how even modest openings could let in enough rain to damage the stoves.
Victoria Jose Arriscado at her home in Sansão Muthemba. She initially kept her stove in her home's enclosed patio, but because it created too much smoke, she relocated it outside, where it fell apart in the rain. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
C-Quest claims its stoves can last for up to 10 years and had planned to generate credits on that assumption; it says in project documents that users can easily remake the bricks. But in Sansão Muthemba, The Post couldn’t find a single person who had done this — even though the stove, when used properly, had been saving on wood costs for some women. Some felt that they’d been given a device that wasn’t worth the time.
“You’d just be making it again, making it again,” said Rosada Domingo, 40.
Among the 13 people whose stoves remained in working condition, all but one had installed the device indoors, mostly in cramped spaces. And only three people said they used the device regularly.
“I don’t like the smoke, especially during summer,” Belgita Morais said.
For many, the project had served as a curiosity. But for Arriscado, a mother of two who sells juice and soft drinks out of her home to people walking by, the stoves represented an indignity — and a lost opportunity.
“People with more income wouldn’t be proud to use this thing,” she said of the stove. “It looks like something a poor person would have.”
She, too, was poor, she said, but also — maybe — on the cusp of something better. Before her divorce, her husband’s salary, from working at the court, helped them buy a concrete house with a living room. But then things had stalled. Her house had electrical outlets but few appliances that Arriscado could afford to plug in. What she aspired to was a wholesale fix-up that would amount to life in the middle class: finishing the house, fixing broken windows, adding a front gate and, most especially, finding a way to cook with electricity or gas.
As she described the idea, she rose from a chair and theatrically pretended to turn on a gas stove, twisting her hand to ignite it.
“If you want to help someone, you have to help them leave poverty,” she said. “Bring us a proper stove. Who deserves to cook with wood inside their house? We need good things, too.”
Arriscado, like several dozen other people in Sansão Muthemba, told The Post that the person who had led the stove distribution — working on behalf of a C-Quest local partner — initially told residents that the stoves would be just one part of a bigger community investment. The company’s representatives, he said, would come back with free food, pans and cooking oil.
Odete Vasco Muguerrina, 31, is a nurse at a local clinic in Sansão Muthemba. She said she sees many cases of people, especially small children, with respiratory conditions, which she says stem in part from the cooking methods. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
Arriscado initially set up the stove in her enclosed patio — as she’d been instructed — even though her eyes teared up with every use, she said.
She had wanted to be seen using the device, in case the company came back with the oil and pans.
But after about a year, tired of the smoke, she transferred it to the same spot in her backyard where she’d once used charcoal.
Rain quickly made the stove lumpy.
Some of her neighbors, their stoves also ruined, had left the metal parts discarded in their yards. One resident had strung them up in a tree. Arriscado salvaged them and placed them near her shed.
Perhaps, she thought, they might be used in something better than a stove.
From Australia to D.C. to Mozambique
Newcombe had called carbon credits an “extraordinary opportunity.” The pollution from campfire-style cooking was causing massive, modern problems. And companies, by purchasing credits, could cha nnel money toward that cause.
A mustachioed Australian raised on a dairy farm, Newcombe is an outsize figure in the industry. He sat until last year on the board of directors at Verra. He had connections from his time at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, where he helped popularize the idea of carbon credits. In public speeches, he told stories of his time in rural areas, seeing forests denuded, seeing women performing backbreaking labor hauling wood and then leaning over fires that were the equivalent of “two packs of cigarettes per day.”
The stove he deployed across Africa, including in Mozambique, was supposed to be an answer to this problem. While many other carbon credit project developers distribute fancier, metal stoves — or even spring for electric cookers, the cleanest option — Newcombe’s goal was reaching people in rural areas, with meager incomes. In Africa, this meant an enormous market, and C-Quest designed a stove with scale in mind, according to several people involved with the company. Once the metal parts had been shipped in, the clay bricks could be built locally, with materials already on hand. Because the stove was relatively low-cost, carbon credits could fully subsidize the stove, making it free to locals.
It was an ambitious business model.
But some in the industry, including analysts and competitors, saw flaws.
Last year, in a post on its website, Abatable, a group that analyzes the carbon market, singled out C-Quest projects as a concern, citing the “low level of technology sophistication.” Shrikant Avi, a former director of venture programs at the nonprofit Clean Cooking Alliance, who worked with a range of project developers, said that the stoves C-Quest uses in Africa are “not durable” and can easily break. C-Quest uses other stove models for its projects outside Africa.
C-Quest said in a statement that the rocket stove, as the model is known, had “made significant contributions in the past.” But the company said its new products would have “significantly better performance and durability.”
Experts who study carbon projects say that C-Quest did not rigorously track usage after the stoves were distributed. Newcombe had helped write a methodology — a playbook for calculating carbon savings — that permitted the company to conduct intermittent surveys to determine the percentage of people regularly cooking with the stove. Academic studies have raised concerns about bias in such surveys, with people prone to providing answers they think the survey-takers want. And the surveys themselves were small, often sampling 48 people to determine use across a nation. In Malawi, C-Quest monitored 0.03 percent of users, according to a recent research note from BeZero, a carbon ratings agency.
Meanwhile, in country after country, C-Quest claimed in documents on the Verra website that 100 percent of its stoves were working and used.
BeZero — analyzing the Malawi project specifically — called the usage rate “improbable” and described the risk of overestimating credits as “significant.” Other projects, including the one in Mozambique, were not assessed.
In an interview in April, Mark Woodall, C-Quest’s chief revenue officer, acknowledged that monitoring had been insufficient but said that the company was “leading the charge” to improve methods. He cited community-level engagement programs designed to monitor and maintain stoves. He said C-Quest planned to increase survey sample sizes and install a “statistically relevant” number of heat monitors on stoves.
“It’s a way for us to continually ground-truth our portfolio,” Woodall said.
A spokesperson for Newcombe said current C-Quest management is trying to “claim credit” for initiatives Newcombe had developed.
Veronica Luis Afonso, 35, sells wood primarily for cooking at a Sansão Muthemba market. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
Gilles Dufrasne, the lead expert on global markets at the Brussels-based nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, said the global carbon credit system gives an advantage to lower-cost producers, who can sell their credits for less. Buyers want those cheap credits because they’re looking for ways to offset their emissions at the lowest cost.
“The whole logic of it drives the high-quality projects out,” Dufrasne said.
Across the world, there are roughly 1,000 cookstove projects aimed at generating carbon credits, and their prices range from $2 to upward of $30. The credits in Mozambique had been selling on average for $6.27 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, according to the finance company MSCI. But there are plenty of other projects — from other developers — on the lower end, as well, and experts have questioned whether their credits, too, are credible. Earlier this year, a study from UC Berkeley researchers said that cookstove projects were overestimating carbon savings by a factor of 10.
One executive for another cookstove company, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the economics of the industry, said that when generating credits at several dollars per ton, developers don’t have the margins to do much more than deposit the stove and walk away. Wilson, from Berkeley, who was unaffiliated with the study, described these as “set-it-and-forget-it” programs — a characterization the company rejects — and said they are the norm at $4 to $6 per ton.
Industry-wide, according to BeZero, the stated usage rate for stoves is 87 percent, meaning C-Quest hadn’t been much of an outlier.
But the recent aspect of alleged wrongdoing makes it stand out.
People familiar with C-Quest’s operations said that employees had alerted C-Quest’s small board of directors — which had recently added members from Colorado-based private equity firm Vision Ridge following its investment into the company — about usage claims late last year. These people say the board created a special committee — that Newcombe was not a part of — to investigate.
Months later, the company announced that Newcombe had “committed wrongdoing,” without specifying. The company’s announcement did not disclose the factors that contributed to over-crediting but acknowledged that an estimated 175,000 stoves were no longer in use or had “fallen into disrepair.”
The people familiar with C-Quest’s operations — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business matters — say the over-crediting stemmed from inaccurate calculations of fuel and stove usage and had gone on for several years.
Newcombe was replaced in February as CEO by Jules Kortenhorst, formerly of Vision Ridge, as the investigation ramped up.
A spokesperson for Newcombe, in a statement, said that Newcombe and others at C-Quest “learned of flaws” last year in the company’s survey methodology. But the spokesperson said that Newcombe pushed for reforms, including a “more reliable measurement-based surveying approach, suspending crediting processes, and re-training staff.” He also advocated for “prompt disclosure to carbon industry verification bodies,” the statement said.
Verra, which is conducting its own review of C-Quest projects, including a review of past communications, said it has “not yet seen any indication” that the company alerted the certifier of potential problems, before the new management’s announcement in June.
C-Quest, in its announcement about the accusations, said the company would adopt new methodologies and policies while focusing on “quality, integrity, and transparency.”
The company claims that villagers are using its stoves in many places — just not to the degree that had been stated — and that those stoves are delivering benefits. C-Quest and Verra are in the process of looking into its projects and determining how many credits were falsely issued. The company plans to eliminate unsold credits that are deemed legitimate to offset ones sold that couldn’t be validated. Under Verra’s rules, this means the environmental accounting evens out — and leaves the buyers off the hook.
Industry players say C-Quest’s crisis, plus earlier research about the sector, has thrown the cookstove industry into turmoil. Some developers see a new opportunity to distinguish themselves as buyers more tightly scrutinize project details. But skepticism is pushing down credit prices.
The average cookstove credit now sells for less than $3.
Smoke from an indoor stove
C-Quest’s new management portrays Sansão Muthemba as an extreme example of how a project can fall into disarray. They say that this area was a particularly poor spot for a project and that recipients more readily use new stoves in more rural areas. Kortenhorst, the new CEO, said in April that “you could not have picked a worse area” to visit.
Discarded components of a TLC-CQC rocket stove. (Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post)
The company noted that it had partnered with a local entity in select areas of Mozambique including Sansão Muthemba — one it no longer works with, the company said. C-Quest routinely used local partners in its Africa projects, a practice the company says it is now backing away from. Kortenhorst said in an April interview that “quality control” was “insufficient when you use too many smaller organizations.”
The company said that all households in Sansão Muthemba have been removed from its database and will no longer generate credits. C-Quest said in a statement in May that “concerns” about the project in Sansão Muthemba had already been raised internally before The Post’s visit. The company acknowledged “that the time that elapsed from concerns raised to the project households taken offline was inadequate.”
Even so, at least a few people are still regularly using the C-Quest stove here. One, Dolca Celestino, lives a quarter-mile from Arriscado’s home, across a main road. One Monday evening, she was preparing dinner.
Celestino’s stove, for three years and counting, had sat inside her small brick home in a room where scarcely a crack of light could shine through. The room where she cooked was separated by a piece of cloth from where she slept with her three children.
“I decided to put it inside to protect it from the rain,” she said.
It was a move aimed at preserving everything she liked about the stove. It cooked food nicely, she said, and it saved her about $8 every week on wood.
But the decision also runs counter to the advised health practices, where the best move — when cooking with wood — is to stay outside.
Cooking indoors, in poorly ventilated places, can increase exposure to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), which works its way deep into lungs. More than a decade ago, science clearly established that PM 2.5 needed to be reduced dramatically, not just a little bit, to deliver meaningful health benefits. Yet according to a database compiled in November 2022 from UC Berkeley, 904 of 992 listed cookstove-related carbon projects use stoves that fall short of World Health Organization guidelines for fine particulates. Based on its performance in the field, C-Quest’s flagship stove in Africa falls into one of the WHO’s poorest categories for PM 2.5.
Projects deploying electric or gas cookers tend to be more expensive and can be logistically prohibitive in rural areas. C-Quest’s Woodall says the company has asked credit buyers whether they’d pay more for credits generated by stoves with better health benefits. The answer they hear, he said, is no.
“The self interest [of the buyer] is about climate change,” Woodall said. “It’s not about health benefits.”
Outside Celestino’s home, the sun was setting. Chickens pecked at the dirt. A drunken neighbor briefly wandered over. Her husband was working late as a home builder, and her kids were hungry.
She crouched down to the opening of the stove, bringing her mouth inches away, and started blowing. No fire — not yet. She fanned the space with a blue plastic lid and then blew some more.
This is how she cooked every meal — crouching, blowing, waiting. She used the stove to cook prawns and porridge and fish, and on this night, spaghetti broken into pieces, mixed with greens.
This night, the fire was taking a while to start. She drew close again — more breathing. She dashed over to a neighbor’s house, grabbed a brick of charcoal and crouched again, feeding it into the opening. Seconds later, the inside of the stove flickered with color.
“Fire,” she said.
Sweat was already beading around Celestino’s neck, and her daughter came over carrying more wood. The fire grew.
Celestino didn’t have two of the metal parts initially supplied with the stove, including a strip of metal that wraps around the pot that is vital to increasing efficiency in C-Quest’s model.
Smoke at first emerged in a few ribbons. Then it became intense. It belched from the device in plumes, and a single lightbulb in the room, hanging overhead, acted like a spotlight, showing the smoke collecting at the ceiling, grayish-white, and spreading down to the floor in a gradient. Two Post reporters started coughing, but Celestino stayed close to the stove and wiped her face with her shirt.
Her 7-year-old stood at the side of the door.
“It’s just a matter of waiting,” she said, and after a few minutes, the heat inside the stove had intensified; the smoke, with better combustion, had died down.
She took a lid off a pot, put some salt in the water, and broke apart the spaghetti.
For one C-Quest beneficiary, it was almost dinnertime.
Tavares Cebola contributed to this report.
By Chico Harlan
Chico Harlan is The Washington Post's global climate correspondent. Previously, he was The Post’s Rome bureau chief, covering southern Europe as well as the Catholic Church. He has also been a member of The Post's financial and national enterprise teams, as well as East Asia bureau chief.