Clean Cooking in Rural Honduras
Putting clean and efficient cookstoves in the hands of those that need them most.
About this Project
Cooking in Central America relies on traditional stoves that burn significant amounts of local wood and emit smoke into the home. The stoves are on for eight hours a day, cooks and home habitants breathe the smoke that covers the kitchen roofs and walls in soot.
These stoves distributed and maintained through this project, managed by Proyector Mirador, save wood, save time, eliminate toxic smoke from the household, and reduce carbon emissions by about 2.7 tons per stove per year, counted for 6 years. To date, the project has avoided the emissions of more than 2 million metric tonnes of CO2 and equivalent gasses (mtCO2e).
Installed directly in the home, the improved cookstoves are built from locally available cement or adobe bricks. The stove features a thermodynamic rocket elbow design that provides more direct heat to the food with less wood, so food is cooked faster. Families save money by purchasing less wood or save time by gathering less wood, rid the house of smoke, cook faster and help save our planet.
Why We Picked This Project
The combustion of traditional fuels for cooking is responsible for 2-5% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Despite only persisting in the atmosphere for 4-12 days — far less than carbon dioxide’s atmospheric lifetime of hundreds of years — black carbon particles have 3,200 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide since they also absorb sunlight, directly heating the surrounding air.
Clean cookstoves are a triple win climate solution—supporting human health, improving environmental quality, and vastly transforming the daily routine of those responsible for cooking and collecting fuel without compromising the quality of food preparation.
This project kicked off in 2009 and is one of the most successful clean cookstove projects to date. 100% of the revenues from the sale of carbon credits go directly to constructing and installing more stoves, and sustaining the training and maintenance services to keep it going. It also supports an impressive 10 SGDs, making it a project with some of the highest measurable co-benefits in our portfolio.
Our Assessment of this Project
Project Developer
Standards & Certifications
Gold Standard, Technologies and Practices to Displace Decentralized Thermal Energy Consumption V 2.0
Timeline
Start Date of Proyecto Mirador
Monitoring Period ends (Jan 2018 – Jan 2019)
Credits for monitoring period issued
Benefits & Impact
Co-Benefits
Monitors each location with GPS & follow-up visits and stores the information in a Salesforce database.
Saves the equivalent of ~5-9 trees per year per stove or 1.6 metric tonnes of firewood per year.
Reduces carbon monoxide and particulate matter in the home by 79%.
Families do not buy a stove; they co-invest in one. They provide bricks and mortar, the project provides construction, know-how, and specialized stove parts.
Financed the construction of 2,500 cookstoves.
Sustainable Development Goals
This project supports the following UN Sustainable Development Goals:
Additional Information
2019-2020
81% of rural households in Honduras use fuelwood for cooking and 65 percent of the country’s total energy comes from fuelwood. Lower-income households are more dependent on wood because it is less costly than electricity or gas. The revenue from the sales of carbon credits helps finance the installation and training necessary to make the switch to cleaner fuels.