World's First Carbon-Financed Sustainable Water Programme Helps Millions in Africa

LONDON, March 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Swiss disease control technology company Vestergaard Frandsen earns Gold Standard carbon credits with innovative business model that tackles global health, water and climate challenges

Vestergaard Frandsen's LifeStraw® Carbon For Water programme has become the world's first safe water project to generate Gold Standard Voluntary Emissions Reduction (VER) credits, and has earned 1.4 million carbon credits.

LifeStraw® Carbon For Water is a cutting-edge demonstration of how carbon finance can enable, at scale, some of the world's most disadvantaged communities to treat their water through the provision of zero-carbon purification technology. Proceeds from the sale of the credits, which Vestergaard Frandsen expects will be issued on a semi-annual basis, will help to sustain the programme over the course of a decade.

LifeStraw® Carbon For Water, launched last year in western Kenya, is the largest water treatment project ever undertaken in a developing country without government or public sector funding, and Vestergaard Frandsen plans to replicate the model elsewhere in the world. In doing so, it will help millions more people in developing countries to improve their health and reduce carbon emissions.

The LifeStraw® Carbon For Water programme has distributed 877,505 LifeStraw® Family water filters in Kenya's Western Province. As a result, more than 90 percent of the province's population now enjoys the ability to consume safe drinking water at no cost to themselves or their government.

One of the ways to treat potentially contaminated water in Kenya is by boiling over an open fire that produces carbon emissions through burning mostly non-renewable wood, which also contributes to a serious deforestation problem in the region. LifeStraw® Family meets World Health Organization standards for "highly protective" means of household removal from water of the bacteria, viruses, and parasites responsible for common diarrheal diseases-without the need to burn and boil. This produces significant carbon savings, and each filter will purify at least 18,000 litres of water-enough to supply a family of five for three years. Safe drinking water is of critical importance to development in places where waterborne illness is the cause of many missed educational and economic opportunities, and, in too many cases, death.

The sustainable programme will repair and replace the water filters as needed, at no cost to users, at service centers throughout the province. Vestergaard Frandsen has employed thousands of local residents to assist with the ten-year programme.  

"With millions of people in developing countries still lacking safe drinking water, and increased pressure on development aid to do more with less, innovating new ways to finance solutions to these problems is absolutely critical," said Vestergaard Frandsen CEO and owner Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen. "I believe that our LifeStraw® Carbon For Water programme blazes a trail for a wide range of projects that bring the public and private sectors together using carbon financing to address multiple public health and environmental issues."

The innovative financing mechanism behind the LifeStraw® Carbon For Water programme holds public and private sector organizations to greater accountability and ensures that maximum impact is delivered on the ground. Funding for the project is contingent upon use of the filters by recipients, so Vestergaard Frandsen is incentivized to promote filtering of water and avoidance of burning biomass by educating households on the importance of drinking safe water and training them on the filter itself.

LifeStraw® Carbon For Water is designed around the unique Gold Standard climate finance platform, which has been critical to the programme's success. The new Gold Standard methodology developed for the project includes a calculation of suppressed demand - an area in which The Gold Standard has led the carbon markets. The Gold Standard is used by the NGO community and many governments as a policy tool for demonstrating best practice in carbon finance, giving further assurance and credibility to such innovative approaches and methodologies. The Gold Standard is working with the German government to explore ways of applying suppressed demand to expand access to carbon finance in Africa and other poor regions that have historically been excluded from its benefits.

The Gold Standard Foundation CEO Adrian Rimmer said, "This is a blueprint for how climate finance projects should look-because it moves beyond a pure focus on carbon. Buyers of Gold Standard credits recognize the need for sustainable development to be delivered alongside emissions reductions, and because The Gold Standard uniquely provides assurances of this, they are prepared to pay a higher price that makes these projects viable."  

ClimateCare, one of the world's leading climate and development specialists, was lead author of the new Gold Standard methodology and will commercialise the credits. CEO Edward Hanrahan added: "ClimateCare are delighted to have been able to support this truly groundbreaking project. Traditionally carbon finance has been used to reduce emissions from large single point sources, the difference here is that you have hundreds of thousands of small interventions, working together to achieve a highly significant reduction, all adding up to what is one of the largest carbon reduction projects in the world. This project is achieving what ClimateCare believes that climate and development finance is all about - and provides a fantastic model for developing dual and triple impact projects in the future."

Accredited London-based firm ERM Certification and Verification Services verified the project's emission reductions and sustainable development monitoring activities.

About Vestergaard Frandsen:

Vestergaard Frandsen is a European company that operates under a unique humanitarian entrepreneurship business model, and is dedicated to creating and deploying technologies that improve the health of people in developing countries. This approach has turned corporate social responsibility into Vestergaard Frandsen's core business, and includes strong support of the Millennium Development Goals.

For more information please visit http://www.carbonforwater.com.

About The Gold Standard Foundation:

The Gold Standard is an award winning certification standard for carbon mitigation projects and is recognised internationally as the benchmark for quality and rigour in both the compliance and voluntary carbon markets. We certify renewable energy and energy efficiency carbon offset projects to ensure that they all demonstrate real and permanent greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions and sustainable development benefits in local communities that are measured, reported and verified. The Gold Standard is the only certification standard trusted and endorsed by more than 80 NGOs worldwide, including Care International, World Vision Australia, Forum for the Future and Mercy Corps. It is also the standard of choice for multiple governments and multinationals.

For more information please visit http://www.cdmgoldstandard.org.

About ClimateCare:

ClimateCare is an independent, "profit for purpose" organisation committed to creating intelligent streams of finance to fund large scale emission reduction and development projects. By financing ground-breaking projects spanning renewable energy, water purification and clean cookstove technology, ClimateCare's climate and development model paves the way for substantial emissions reductions while delivering significant health, economic and social benefits in the world's least developed countries. ClimateCare offers corporate organisations the opportunity to adopt a smart approach to addressing their environmental impacts by offsetting their carbon emissions and supporting sustainable development. ClimateCare applies its expertise gained from 15 years' developing emission reduction projects to lead pioneering methodologies that act as blueprints for some of today's most innovative and advanced sustainable development projects. Its Gold Standard methodology for efficient cookstoves has facilitated the distribution of millions of cookstoves around the world.

For more information please visit http://www.climatecare.org.

Contacts:

Peter Cleary
Communications and Public Relations Director
Vestergaard Frandsen
Email: pc@vestergaard-frandsen.com
Tel: +1-347-653-5857

Tanya Petersen
Director, Marketing and Communications
The Gold Standard Foundation
Email: Tanya@cdmgoldstandard.org
Tel: +41-79-912-2447