Only slightly more than three and a half years after the start of its reduction period on 10th of May 2012, UPM’s Sichuan Household Biogas PoA already has avoided the impressive amount of 2 million tons of GHG emissions. These GHG savings are sufficient to compensate for the annual carbon footprint of roughly 200,000 German citizens.

The PoA’s innovative carbon finance approach annually reimburses a considerable portion of all revenue from sales of the PoA’s premium quality Gold Standard CERs to the participating low-income rural households. By offering an additional regular income generated by carbon credits, the PoA provides a highly attractive incentive to qualifying households for an investment in climate-friendly biogas digesters and convenient biogas cook stoves.

Another portion of the PoA’s emissions trading revenue is earmarked for the PoA’s implementation partner, the Sichuan Rural Energy Office (SREO) and its many local subsidiaries, and will be used to pay the costs of an annual technical biodigester maintenance service by trained and certified SREO experts. In doing so, the PoA prevents interruptions of biogas digester operation and significantly reduces the risk of dangerous accidents.

According to SREO data, our PoA accounts for nearly 400,000 out of a total of 660,000 newly installed biogas systems in Sichuan in this decade (more than 60%). These figures testify how successful this CDM and Gold Standard PoA has been in introducing and disseminating state-of-the-art biogas technology, especially among those poor farmer families in rural Sichuan that, due to financial constraints, have not been able before to participate in the existing rural biogas promotion scheme of the Chinese government.

The next issuance of the PoA’s Gold Standard CERs (GS CERs) is scheduled for end of March 2016 with roundabout 600,000 GS CERs.

For further information about this outstanding PoA and the availability of its Gold Standard CERs, please visit the PoA website at http://www.household-biogas.com or contact:

Martin Dilger, Managing Director, UPM Germany
mdilger(at)upm-cdm.eu, T: +49 89 1222197 – 50

and

Gaiai Guo, Vice General Manager, UPM China
guog(at)upm-cdm.eu, T: +86 10 6468 0500 – 13