Cookstove Carbon Credit Monitoring: Usage Measured, Not Assumed
Cookstove projects have taken more criticism than almost any other credit type, and most of it comes down to one assumption: that the stoves handed out are used every day instead of the old open fire. A 2024 study in Nature Sustainability looked at 51 projects across 25 countries and estimated they were over-credited by around nine times, with stove use and the share of non-renewable firewood among the biggest gaps. The fix: measure use instead of assuming it.
Our 60-second walkthrough shows how a fictional project, Kasilu Cookstoves, does exactly that on CitizenClimate: a temperature logger on each of its 1,200 stoves, households who sync the data and get paid for it, and a carbon estimate built only from recorded stove-days.
Setting it up
1. Create your cookstove project, with the villages and homes on the map.
2. Register each stove with a GPS-tagged photo and pair its temperature logger, which takes a reading every five minutes.
3. Invite every household with a QR code or invite code.
4. Add the SDG 7 survey, Affordable and Clean Energy, covering cooking fuel and energy access, scored automatically.
5. Teach stove use and safe cooking with an infographic lesson and a scored quiz.
6. Open the forum and grievances, so anyone can raise a problem in a few taps.
In the kitchens
7. Snap the stove, with GPS: once a month the household photographs its stove in use at the registered home, and AI confirms it's the same stove with a fire lit.
8. Sync the logger by Bluetooth from the household's own phone: 30 days is 8,640 readings, with every meal a heat spike. Readings wait offline until there's signal, then the household is paid by mobile money (100 KES per verified sync in the film).
9. Stove gone cold? Seven days without cooking alerts a technician. In the film, a cracked liner is replaced and cooking restarts that evening.
10. Every meal on the record: stove-days, cooking time, payments and carbon, per stove and per project.
11. Live on your website via API, with stove-days updating after every sync.
How a temperature logger proves a stove is used
Temperature loggers used as stove use monitors, often called SUMs, have been a research tool for more than a decade. Fixed to the stove, they record its temperature at set intervals. When it climbs past a threshold (50 °C in the film), that's a cooking event, and clusters of events become meals. In the film, three days of data show nine meals, and 1,148 of the project's 1,200 stoves (95.7%) were used in the past week.
The monthly GPS photo adds an independent check: the stove is still in the home it was registered to, and in use. Between them, they answer the first two questions a verifier asks. Was the stove adopted, and is it still being used?
Why households sync the data themselves
Most monitoring programmes send field staff from house to house to download loggers. It's slow, costly and leaves data months out of date. Here the household does it in a minute from its own phone and is paid by mobile money for each verified sync. That puts money in the kitchen every month, keeps the data flowing, and means a technician only travels when the logs show a problem. It also gives households a reason to keep their stove working.
What the SDG 7 survey adds
Loggers show when the new stove is hot. They don't show whether the old fire is still burning alongside it, a habit known as stacking and one of the factors most often overstated in cookstove projects. The SDG 7 survey asks each household about its primary cooking fuel and access to energy, so the project can see whether the new stove has replaced the old one or simply joined it.
From stove-days to a carbon estimate
The carbon card in the film is built from measured use only. 1,148 stoves in use over 365 days gives 419,020 stove-days. At an illustrative 3.0 kg of wood saved per stove-day, that's about 1,257 t of wood. Multiplied by 1.75 t CO₂ per tonne of wood and a non-renewable biomass fraction (fNRB) of 0.30, it comes to roughly 660 t CO₂e a year. The 0.30 is the CDM default, which the ICVCM allows for a limited period. All three factors are illustrative; a real project uses its methodology's values.
Built for the new quality bar
In March 2025 the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) approved three cookstove methodologies, with conditions: Gold Standard's Metered and Measured Energy Cooking Devices and TPDDTEC, and Verra's VM0050, while rejecting older approaches such as AMS-II.G.
The conditions push projects towards measured fuel use, tracked stove adoption through stove use monitors or robust surveys, and science-based fNRB values. A record of every stove's use, location and condition is the kind of evidence that bar calls for. CitizenClimate collects and structures it; credits are issued by the standard after independent verification.
The project, people and figures in the film are fictional and illustrative. The film says improved cookstoves rather than clean cooking, because biomass stoves, however efficient, don't count as clean fuels under SDG indicator 7.1.2.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you monitor cookstove use for carbon credits?
With stove use monitors, usually temperature loggers fixed to each stove that record when it's hot enough to be cooking. Monthly GPS-tagged photos and household surveys add checks on adoption, location and stacking.
Why have cookstove carbon credits been criticised?
A 2024 study in Nature Sustainability estimated that a sample of 51 projects was over-credited by about 9.2 times, mainly because of optimistic assumptions about non-renewable biomass, stove adoption, stove use and fuel consumption. Parts of it were disputed, but it pushed the market towards measured use.
What is fNRB?
The fraction of non-renewable biomass: the share of the firewood used that's harvested faster than it regrows. Only that share counts towards emission reductions. ICVCM conditions call for values from the MoFuSS model or, for a limited time, the CDM default of 0.3.
How do households get paid?
Each time a household syncs its stove's logger and the data is verified, it's paid directly by mobile money. The film uses an illustrative 100 KES per monthly sync; the rate is set by the project.
Does CitizenClimate issue cookstove credits?
No. It collects and structures the evidence, from stove registration to logger data and photos, and works out an estimate from measured use. Credits are issued by the standard after independent verification.