Xpansiv announced yesterday the upcoming launch of a standardized contract for cookstove projects, the SD-GEO. The contract will focus on projects with 5+ SDGs from Verra and Gold Standard.
We’ve had interest from clients who are interested in trading the product, so we wanted to share how many projects would qualify for the new contract, and the number of credits that would be available at launch.
We had previously categorized projects by sub-type (cookstove, water filter, etc. within household devices), and the number of projects that have more than five SDGs is fairly limited: only 80 across Gold Standard and Verra. (For Verra, we are using SD Vista data, as it’s not yet clear whether the standardized contract will accept projects that self-report SDGs in their Sustainable Development Contribution Reports.)
The project vintages accepted will be from 2017 onwards, so we limited the analysis to the remaining credits (issued minus retired) from those vintages only.
In total, we’re forecasting around 6.5m tCO2e to be available for the SD-GEO, based on the contract requirements as we understand them. This represents the total potential volume of non-retired credits; some of the credits may already be committed to a buyer for a specific use.
Most of the available credits are of vintage 2021, with one project even issuing ~150,000 credits in 2022.
The most prevalent SDGs, common to all 80 projects, were SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being), SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).
That makes sense, as every cookstove project is meant to contribute to climate change mitigation (SDG 13), lowers energy costs (SDG 7), and improves users’ health (SDG 3). The least common SDG among these projects is SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities.
As SD-GEO comes onto CBL on December 5, it’ll be interesting to see how much of the total available volume gets onto the exchange.
For more data on the voluntary carbon market, check out our database demo here.