News of Sudan.

Carbon Clear Launches Sudan's First Co2 Project

Voluntary offset developer Carbon Clear will distribute 10,000 clean cookstoves in Sudan, the company said Friday, helping the war-torn country attract its first investment towards cutting household emissions.
"These are real halo projects for why carbon markets should exist," said Adrian Rimmer, CEO of project accreditation firm The Gold Standard, which certified the country's first registered low-carbon scheme.
The U.N. has struggled to channel investment to the world's poorest countries through its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), with less than three percent of registered projects located in Africa.
But the voluntary carbon market can use more innovative approaches to get projects off the ground, especially in places that find it hard to attract international investment, Rimmer said.
He said one of the biggest challenges was setting up a suitable monitoring and verification system for the Sudanese project, as traditional emissions auditors were reluctant to send staff to the troubled country, which has been blighted with conflict for decades.
"We put new rules in place around conflict zones, so that we could use objective observers to do the work," Rimmer said, adding that these could be people from trusted NGOs or U.N. staff already deployed in the country.
Under the scheme, Carbon Clear will give households loans to pay for the gas stoves, which typically cost $100 each.
The 10,000 stoves are expected to cut emissions by 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide over 10 years, generating an equivalent number of carbon credits, called Verified Emissions Reductions.
The credits will then be sold to companies, which are increasingly turning to cookstove schemes to offset their carbon footprints because of the sustainability benefits they can provide impoverished communities.
"Customers in the voluntary market want to know the story behind the project that makes them more attractive," said Jamal Gore, director of Carbon Clear.
Traditional cookstoves burn coal, kerosene and charcoal, fuels that are several times more expensive than gas and create a thick smoke linked to deadly health problems like lung cancer.
Rimmer said in just one year, households that burn gas instead can save as much as the cost of the stove.
Gold Standard VERs from cookstove projects can fetch up to 7.50 euros each, according to market experts, some 25 times the cost of a U.N offset.