Making carbon finance work for clean cooking: How different carbon credit transaction structures influence access to carbon finance

Key Messages

• Carbon finance can deliver both results-based revenues and unlock upfront financing for capital investments, with the chosen path impacting the carbon price project developers can secure.
• How carbon revenues are to be used impacts which transaction partners are best to partner with, including whether to engage with project aggregators, investment funds, brokerage firms or direct end-users of carbon credits.
• A trade-off exists between maximising carbon revenues reaching clean cooking technology users, and using carbon financing strategically to overcome barriers to market entry and/or to scale operations.
• Carbon finance strategies will be impacted by new market entrants, innovations around higher tier clean cooking technologies, and pioneering business models supported by pay-as-you-go systems.
• With carbon prices likely to remain volatile in the future, project developers can use different transaction structures to optimise the value of generated carbon credits.
• Project developers’ positioning in the carbon market can also evolve over time as funding needs, access to finance conditions, and the carbon market outlook change.