Swiss Carbon Offsets Improve Air Quality but Not Livelihoods

Six years after the pilot began, improved household air has become the clearest gain for families living in extreme poverty. In the highlands of northern Peru, Swiss-funded cookstoves have replaced open fires in thousands of homes. The health benefit is tangible: children breathe less smoke while their families prepare meals. The financial benefit has been far harder to find.\n\nJuana Chamorro Briceño, a mother of four, received one of the stoves in late 2020. When SWI swissinfo.ch returned in June 2026, she was working a short-term cleaning job and trying to support two teenage children. Her husband had died six months earlier after an accident in an illegal coal mine. The children had left school to work in illegal gold mining.\n\nBriceño said the stove had spared her family the smoke that once filled their home. She also said the household needed much more help. Her husband’s informal employment left her without compensation, while his lengthy hospital treatment in Trujillo, a five-hour bus journey away, increased the family’s expenses. Her experience reflects the gap between a targeted climate intervention and the wider economic pressures facing Andean households.

The Tuki Wasi programme has reached about 35,000 households, or between 140,000 and 170,000 people. Microsol, a French social-impact company, implements the Swiss government’s project with a regional partner. The initiative forms part of Switzerland’s bilateral carbon-offset policy, under which emissions generated in Switzerland can be offset through projects in another country.\n\nThe pilot was selected to offset emissions from road transport in Switzerland. Its cookstoves use less wood than open fires and move cooking away from the most polluting conditions inside the home. The arrangement also carries a development promise, since Swiss bilateral offset projects are intended to benefit people living in extreme poverty.\n\nThe scale gives Switzerland a visible presence in communities far from the Alpine country’s roads and fuel systems. It also places a high burden on the project’s evidence. A stove can reduce smoke exposure and wood consumption, yet it cannot replace a lost income, cover a hospital bill or return children to school. Briceño’s household shows how climate finance can deliver a specific service while leaving the broader causes of poverty untouched.\n\nThe programme’s climate accounting and health effects therefore sit alongside a more difficult development record. The families interviewed by SWI swissinfo.ch valued the technology, while describing lives shaped by insecure work, informal mining and weak social protection.

A damaged stove can still become another expense for a family living on occasional wages. At a market-day workshop in Sanagorán, women wearing tall woven straw hats arrived with partners and children to learn how to maintain the technology. Microsol staff demonstrated how to repair loose adobe bricks with a local cement mixture. They also showed how corrugated metal scraps could be flattened and cut into replacement pot supports.\n\nThe workshop embodied the programme’s emphasis on self-reliance. Ralph Callalli, Microsol’s Tuki Wasi coordinator, said the organisation wanted users to adopt the stoves as their own and avoid dependence on charities. That approach can make repairs more practical when materials and advice are available locally.\n\nThe session also exposed barriers to participation. When staff handed out a multiple-choice survey, several women who said they could not read or write asked for help completing it. Their requests matter for any assessment of whether beneficiaries understand the technology, maintain it and experience the promised health improvements.\n\nSantos Briceño Azevedo, an early recipient, said he could find only occasional agricultural work an hour’s walk away. He earns PEN 30, equivalent to CHF 7.30, for a day’s labour. His stove had crumbling bricks and a damaged pot support. The workshop offered repair guidance, while his income left little room for buying materials.