- Date
- 26th March 2026
- Categories
- Electric Cooking, Finance
By Professor Matt Leach and Malcolm Bricknell (Modern Energy Cooking Services)
Black carbon has long sat awkwardly within climate discussions. We know it matters – a great deal. It is one of the Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs), remaining in the atmosphere for only days to a few years, yet driving rapid warming over that short timeframe. Reducing SLCPs is therefore one of the fastest ways to slow near-term temperature rise and reduce the risk of crossing climate tipping points – irreversible thresholds that could trigger abrupt and potentially catastrophic change.
Among SLCPs, black carbon (commonly known as ‘soot’) stands out not only for its climate impact but also for its role in local air pollution and associated health harms.
Black carbon is emitted from incomplete combustion of fuels and biomass, with traditional cooking among the largest sources. Yet despite its importance, it has often been treated as difficult to measure, challenging to incorporate into existing mitigation frameworks, and largely excluded from the mechanisms that drive finance and scale. Addressing this gap has been a central aim of the MECS black carbon work.
Over the past year, MECS, Berkeley Air Monitoring Group and Orbis Air have been developing a practical way to quantify black carbon (BC) reductions from clean cooking transitions – not as a theoretical exercise, but as something that can actually be used by projects, funders, and carbon markets. The newly released Phase 2 report marks an important step forward in that journey. It takes us from a well-founded theory to something much closer to real-world application.
The starting point was the initial approach developed in Phase 1. That work set out how BC and organic carbon (OC) emissions could be calculated alongside existing carbon accounting approaches, building directly on the Gold Standard’s metered methodology for cooking devices. The key idea was simple but powerful: if projects are already collecting high-quality, metered energy data, then we should be able to use that data to say much more about their impacts – not just CO₂, but also short-lived climate pollutants like black carbon.
As we discussed in the earlier blog, this opened up an important possibility. Clean cooking projects could begin to demonstrate not only long-term decarbonisation benefits, but also near-term climate impacts – those that matter over the next couple of decades, when the risks of crossing climate tipping points are most acute.
What Phase 2 does is take that idea and stress-test it, both in terms of the impacts being measured, and how confidently we can measure them.
Towards scientific consensus on impacts
The new work validates the science, drawing on discussions with leaders in the field and ensuring that the estimated climate impacts are robust, with uncertainties well understood. At the core of the methodology is a clear hierarchy of confidence in different climate impact pathways.
Most robust and central: Direct radiative forcing (DRF) from black carbon is the most certain and highest-confidence component. The physics of BC absorption is well understood, and uncertainties mainly come from co-emitted species (like organic carbon and sulphates), not BC itself. Established models (e.g. GEOS-Chem, FASST) can reliably translate emissions into climate impacts. This is the backbone of the methodology and can be operationalised using precomputed model sensitivities.
Highly certain (but treated separately): CO₂ and CH₄ temperature responses are even more certain due to their long lifetimes and simpler behaviour. Their impacts can be estimated with low uncertainty using established IPCC-derived metrics. These strengthen overall credibility but are excluded from the add-on methodology, as they are already covered in carbon markets.
Moderate confidence: Snow and ice (albedo) effects from BC are physically well understood, but harder to attribute accurately at country or project level due to spatial and seasonal variability.
Lowest confidence (and most uncertain): Indirect and semi-direct aerosol effects (especially cloud interactions) remain the weakest and most uncertain area. These depend on complex atmospheric processes that cannot yet be reliably modelled at project level.
The methodology is deliberately built around only the high-confidence components (especially BC direct radiative forcing), with the possibility in future to add other components, as the science and modelling improves.
Metrics for impact
A lot of effort has also gone into making sure the methodology is usable. That means aligning it with existing systems, keeping assumptions conservative, and engaging with both technical experts and potential users. Because ultimately, the success of something like this is not determined by how elegant it is scientifically, but by whether it can actually be adopted in practice.
One of the more interesting aspects of the work is the choice of how to express impact. Whilst it would be neatest to express all climate impacts in one common metric (e.g. CO2e over 100 years), our stakeholder discussions showed deep concerns about trying to compare long term climate stabilisation (e.g. from CO2 mitigation) with reduction in shorter term warming (e.g. from BC and other Short-Lived Climate Forcers). Rather than forcing BC into CO₂-equivalent terms, the approach focuses on the near-term effects, capturing the real, time-sensitive nature of black carbon, using change in temperature as a proxy. This is a subtle but important shift. It reflects a growing recognition that not all climate pollutants behave the same way, and that our metrics should reflect that.
So where does this leave us?
What is becoming clearer is how much this kind of work depends on digital data. The ability to use metered energy consumption as the backbone of the approach is what makes it viable. More broadly, it reflects a shift in the sector: modern energy cooking, with its digital MRV capabilities, is enabling a new generation of impact measurement that simply wasn’t possible before.
The next step for black carbon is to take this work out of the research space and into the formal carbon market process, starting with submission to Gold Standard, as an add-on to existing carbon credit standards. That is a critical moment. It is where the methodology will be tested not just scientifically, but institutionally – against the requirements, expectations, and scrutiny of a global standard. Alongside that, there will be early projects beginning to apply the approach in practice, helping to shape how it works in real contexts. And, as ever, there is more that can be done on the science – improving the evidence base on the (currently) lower-confidence impacts and exploring ways to estimate the actual near-term climate impacts, in place of the current temperature reduction proxy.
Stepping back, the direction of travel is quite encouraging. We are moving from a position where black carbon was widely acknowledged but poorly integrated, to one where it can be quantified, valued, and potentially financed as part of clean cooking transitions. That matters because it changes the story. Clean cooking is not only about long-term emissions reductions. It is also about near-term climate benefits, improved air quality, and resilience.
With Phase 2, the MECS programme and its partners have taken a major step toward making black carbon impacts measurable. And if we can measure them properly, we can value them – and if we can value them, we stand a much better chance of mobilising the finance needed to scale clean cooking.
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Photo Credit: Featured image in this blog is AI generated using ChatGPT.
AI Disclaimer: This blog was written by AI as a summary of the phase 2 report, prompted by M. Leach, and edited by a human.