Credible Carbon remains the only South African based voluntary carbon market registry, focusing on greenhouse gas reducing projects which also have strong poverty alleviation cobenefits. Through stringent, independent carbon audits, the registry has attained high credibility amongst corporate and private offset purchasers. The Credible Carbon projects, chosen both for their emission reduction capability and for their poverty alleviation co-benefits have proved popular with corporate and private offset buyers.
In 2014 Credible Carbon off-set 20 000 tCO2e. For 2015, we have committed to offset 30 000 tCO2e and will transfer at least 70% of the revenue from these transactions to projects – the balance will be used to pay auditors, lawyers project proponents and for registry development.
An exciting new project on our registry is Kuyasa. This was a pioneering project in the post-Kyoto carbon market under the UN Clean Development Mechanism and the Gold Standard. However, after more than five years no Kuyasa offsets had been sold. So the Kuyasa project team decided to try the voluntary carbon market instead – and chose Credible Carbon as the registry.
Kuyasa is low-carbon housing development in one of the poorest and most vulnerable corners of Khayelitsha, Western Cape. By 2014, the project had installed solar water heaters (110 litres), ceilings and compact fluorescent energy efficient lightbulbs (CFLs) on 2,100 houses. The project saves households money that would be spent on coal-fired electricity and supplementary paraffin, improves indoor air quality and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Co-benefits of the project activity include reduced household expenditure on coal-fired electricity, local job creation, a reduction in local air pollution with subsequent decreases in
pulmonary pneumonia, carbon monoxide poisoning and other respiratory illnesses. A decrease in accidents and damage to property as a result of fire is also anticipated.
Awareness-raising is provided as part of this project and Kuyasa has formed a local maintenance team that conducts installations and maintenance. The team is comprised of a number of (previously unemployed) unskilled or semi-skilled individuals resident in the area that were given access to the work via the Ward Development Forum (WDF) in Khayelitsha. To date the project created 85 full time jobs of which 50 were youth, 28 were women and 3 were disabled and paid a total of 65 425 job days. A total of 2 350 work opportunities were created during the implementation phase and 5 were created during the maintenance phase. The installed technologies save the beneficiary households an estimated R1 000 per annum in energy costs, while delivering a more liveable, safer and healthier dwelling. We hope this inspiring project will continue to do well and that their carbon offset sales will at last become a reality.
With the South African Carbon Tax still scheduled for January 2016 implementation, we look forward to a vibrant voluntary carbon market in the next few years.