Cook­stove car­bon off­set projects can progress mul­ti­ple Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals (SDGs), includ­ing cli­mate, ener­gy, health, gen­der, pover­ty and defor­esta­tion. How­ev­er, project emis­sion reduc­tions must
be accu­rate­ly or con­ser­v­a­tive­ly esti­mat­ed to avoid under­min­ing cli­mate action and long-term SDG financ­ing. Here we con­duct a com­pre­hen­sive, quan­ti­ta­tive, qual­i­ty assess­ment of off­sets by com­par­ing five cook­stove method­olo­gies with pub­lished lit­er­a­ture and our own analy­sis. We find mis­align­ment, in order of impor­tance, with frac­tion of non-renew­able bio­mass, firewood–charcoal con­ver­sion, stove adop­tion, stove usage, fuel con­sump­tion, stack­ing (using mul­ti­ple stoves), rebound and emis­sion fac­tors. Addi­tion­al­i­ty, leak­age, per­ma­nence and over­lap­ping claims require more research. We esti­mate that our project sam­ple is over-cred­it­ed 9.2 times. Gold Standard’s metered method­ol­o­gy, which direct­ly monitors

fuel use, is most aligned with our esti­mates (1.5 times over-cred­it­ed) and has the largest poten­tial for emis­sion abate­ment and health ben­e­fit. We pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions to align method­olo­gies with cur­rent sci­ence and SDG progress.