People
Household-scale | Improving Living Conditions
Bio-ethanol Stoves
Household Biogas
Solar Lighting
Safe Water (filtration)
Cookstoves
Solar Cookers
Safe Water (borehole rehabilitation)
Carbon offset projects improving the living conditions of the global poor are not as well known as infrastructure-scale renewable energy projects.
These projects replace energy sourced from fossil fuels (coal, kerosene), or make better use of biomass fuels like firewood and charcoal.
Biomass fuels are typically unsustainably extracted from the local forests.
The emissions avoided due to the changed fuel use or improved energy efficiency are verified by either Gold Standard or VCS and can be used as a carbon offset.
When you buy a carbon offset from the People theme, you are buying a tonne of verified climate benefit which directly improves people’s lives
People | Project Types
These projects are household-scale climate solutions that directly benefit people within their everyday life, especially women and children.
Emission reductions are achieved by using technologies appropriate to households, for cooking, lighting and to create clean, safe water for their use.
Clean cooking projects can use household biogas, solar cookers, bio-ethanol, or improved cookstoves.
Household biogas and solar cookers replace coal for cooking, improved cookstoves use fuel more efficiently while bio-ethanol cookers avoid smoky traditional stoves.
Safe water projects provide clean drinking water by rehabilitating community boreholes or providing households with water filters that use gravity.
Solar lighting projects provide households with small lighting kits that have a small solar PV panel and battery paired with LED lighting.
People | Sustainability Beyond Carbon
These project types have a wide variety of non-carbon benefits to people, especially the most vulnerable.
They reduce the considerable time, effort and risk of injury or violence for women and children while collecting fuel.
The technologies provide increased time for other tasks, education, employment and economic activity.
By reducing fuel demands, they decrease the degradation of local forests and the associated impacts on biodiversity.
Reducing indoor air pollution and improving drinking water quality saves lives as these are two of the biggest killers of the poor.
Help improve health and safety (e.g. burn risks), especially for women and children.
The projects’ create employment directly by using local people to implement the dissemination and monitoring of the technology.
Improving gender equality and women’s empowerment are designed into projects.
Households save money by not needing to buy polluting fuels, allowing this money to be spent elsewhere.
Improving Living Conditions
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2021) – “Clean Water and Sanitation”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/clean-water-sanitation’ [Online Resource]
Safe Water
Safe Water means:
access to an improved water source on site, available when needed and free from contamination.
2,200 million people do not have access to safe water
At least 2 billion people’s source of drinking water is contaminated with faeces.
Basic services means not having to walk more than 15 minutes for clean water.
785 million cannot even access this
144 million rely on water from untreated surface water like lakes, ponds, rivers and streams.
Cookstoves
Around 2,600 million people cook using open fires or simple inefficient stoves
They use firewood, charcoal, animal dung, crop wastes, kerosene and coal.
Improving stove efficiency reduces the fuel used – better burning also reduces smoke indoors.
Nearly 4 million people will die prematurely this year from household air pollution.
Almost 50% of pneumonia deaths in kids under 5 years are caused by breathing soot.
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2013) – “Indoor Air Pollution”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution’ [Online Resource]
People | Household-scale Carbon Offsets
People | Cookstoves
Projects involve manufacturing and/or disseminating 1000’s of highly efficient cookstoves.
Cookstoves can come in different sizes to help families and small to medium sized businesses.
The cookstove may include a ceramic liner to increase combustion efficiency and retain heat.
Some are 50% more fuel efficient than traditional methods.
Replaces coal and other solid fuels (firewood, charcoal, dung, straw) for cooking and heating.
Cookstoves reduce emissions, help curb deforestation and improve indoor air quality.
They provide relief from high fuel costs, decrease the time and energy spent collecting fuel, cook faster and improve health by creating less indoor pollution.
They help protect family members from burns and accidents common to open-air fires.
Projects can contribute to gender equality and empowerment of women. They provide ownership of a new asset, the stove.
People | Safe Water (Borehole Rehabilitation)
Many rural areas are characterized by poor access to clean drinking water.
Water sources (boreholes, wells etc) often suffer suffer micro-biological contamination and are polluted by salt.
These projects are often small scale and involve the installation or rehabilitation of water supply and/or purification systems, typically solar powered.
This removes the need to boil water using local fuels.
Reduced demand for fuel lowers forest biomass removal, helping maintain biodiversity.
Helps improve hygiene, social, economic and environmental issues.
Reduced indoor air pollution improves health of people in the household.
Water-borne diseases due to unsafe drinking water successfully addressed.
Projects help raise hygiene awareness among local population.
People | Safe Water (Filtration)
Point-of-use water filters treat contaminated drinking water.
Microbiological purifier delivers clean drinking water.
Requires no electricity or additional consumables beyond the unit itself.
Removes the need to boil water using non-renewable biomass.
Carbon finance is helping provide a significant improvement in public health.
Avoids firewood and charcoal being burned, slowing deforestation and degradation.
Reducing pressure on local forests helps maintain biodiversity.
Reduced incidence of waterborne diseases, especially among under 5’s.
Women and children spend less time gathering and carrying firewood.
Improved indoor air quality from not burning firewood to heat water.
People | Household Biogas
Households are provided with a biodigester, typically a fixed dome tank.
The biodigester replaces the coal fired stoves that are used by rural households.
Organic matter including manure and other wastes are decayed anaerobically (without oxygen).
This biological digestion produces methane which is then used for cooking.
The recovery and use of the biogas reduces methane emissions from poor manure management practices.
Replaces coal and other solid fuels (firewood, charcoal, dung, straw) for cooking and heating
Reduces expenditure on coal and other fuels, freeing up money for other uses.
Increases employment for local people (construction and servicing of biodigesters).
Improves the living and cooking conditions for the household.
Decreases indoor air pollution and helps improve the household’s health.
Popularizes practical, appropriately-scaled energy technology.
People | Solar Cookers
The solar cooker uses parabolic reflectors to gather sunlight for cooking.
Generally composed of cooker body, pot rack, cooker rack and a tracking and adjusting mechanism.
In the projects sold by Beyond Neutral, most of the rural households in the area use coal-fired stoves for water boiling and cooking.
Solar cookers enable these rural households to partly and efficiently substitute solar energy for coal use.
Replaces coal and other solid fuels (firewood, charcoal, dung, straw) for cooking and heating.
No construction is required to use the solar cookers.
Able to be produced domestically within the country.
The lifetime of a solar cooker is at least 10 years.
Consume less coal, spend less on fuel and lower fire risk from coal-fired stoves.
Create no smoke so improve indoor air quality.
Local jobs and training are created, people educated about solar energy technology.
People | Project Examples
Cookstoves
VCS 1719
Verified Carbon Standard
Malawi and Mozambique
20,000+ domestic fuel-efficient cookstoves replace inefficient three-stone fires or traditional pot supports.
Beyond the Carbon
Improves indoor air quality, safety and the lives of women and children, reduces use of firewood gathered unsustainably from existing forests, helping reduce habitat degradation.
Safe Water (boreholes)
GS 11134
Gold Standard
Southern Province, Rwanda
Provides safe water through borehole rehabilitation and chemical disinfection when required.
Beyond the Carbon
Decreases consumption of forest biomass for boiling water, protecting the forest ecosystem and improves water and indoor air quality, helping improve health.
Household Biogas
GS 2664
Gold Standard
Hainan Province, China
15,555 households equipped with biodigester to replace old coal fired stoves.
Beyond the Carbon
Biogas use reduces methane from manure, improves indoor air quality and saves the household money.
Solar Cookers
VCS 1860
Verified Carbon Standard
Gansu, China
49,000 solar cookers enable 196,000 people to use the sun instead of coal to cook food and boil water.
Beyond the Carbon
Improves indoor air quality by avoiding need to burn coal, reduces fire risk and fuel expenses, suited to remote, rural areas.
Visit our Carbon Shop
Buying carbon offsets from Beyond Neutral is easy
All the projects sold by Beyond Neutral are accredited under either VCS or Gold Standard , so the offset you buy has been created by a project that:
- follows a specific methodology;
- has been verified as having occurred by one of that Standard’s third party verification bodies; and
- is tracked in that Standard’s Registry using a unique serial number from issuance until retirement on your behalf.
