Rural China Grouped Small Hydro Project
Stockwell International is again working alongside Climate Friendly to take action against carbon emissions. This year we have chosen to offset emissions by purchasing verified carbon credits towards the Rural China Grouped Small Hydro Project.
The Grouped Small Hydro Project in China is a well-established project generating very significant emission reductions, with a range of social programs already in place and ready for expansion. Importantly, we developed this project as the first Social Carbon accredited project outside Brazil, to distinguish the project from other hydropower schemes and to make sure we could deliver the commitment to improve the lives of villagers living around the projects. Five years after validation, we are immensely proud of the results as a demonstration of our values and our commitment as an elite project developer to go beyond carbon as usual.
Social Carbon is a unique quality label in the world of voluntary emission reductions for the range, depth and tracking of project improvements.
It quantifies and qualifies social benefits across six complementary areas: social, carbon, human, financial, natural and technological. In order to qualify for the Social Carbon label, projects need to demonstrate the capacity to deliver continual improvements across all areas over their entire lifetime.
That means that rather than a one-off delivery of measured social benefits, Social Carbon projects require constant maintenance, improvement and increased resources.
he project is unique as it is made up of 95 small individual power plants which use the flow of rivers to generate clean electricity. These 95 projects have created jobs for local people, upgraded the community infrastructures and some of the ongoing revenues from sales of carbon credits are used to fund social initiatives. For example, in the Lishadi region, there is an agricultural education program; other initiatives include composting toilets, education programs for children, as well as a disaster relief fund. This project is supplied by SPC.
