Is a charcoal crisis looming for Tanzania?

Tanzania figures prominently when you google the terms “Africa, charcoal, poverty, and environment.”

The facts and figures I came across gave me pause. Tanzania burns one million tons of charcoal each year, which amounts to clearing more than 300 hectares (about 750 acres) of forest every day to produce charcoal. For context, that’s about 1,000 sq miles each year or the equivalent of about two New York Cities, including its five boroughs. Unfortunately, the rate of deforestation outstrips the replacement rate by about 3 to 1. That means that, for every acre planted, three are lost.

What’s more, the number of people who are dying, particularly women and children, from inhaling the smoke is also increasing, says the World Health Organization, who claims that more than 75 people die daily in Tanzania from inhaling smoke from inefficient wood burning technologies.

As I continued to research Tanzania’s energy poverty, woodfuel, and charcoal consumption, I was led to an important research paper provocatively titled, Has the woodfuel crisis returned? Urban charcoal consumption in Tanzania and its implications to present and future forest availability.

Published in 2007, the paper asked thought-provoking questions, like, “how much does charcoal production contribute to forest loss? And, “can urban populations be compelled to switch from charcoal consumption in favor of more sustainable fuels, like natural gas and electricity?”

Perhaps the greatest take-away from the paper was the realization that, when it comes to forest and environmental degradation, wood and charcoal are two very different fuels with very different impacts.

There were so many questions raised and assertions made in the paper that I was compelled to track down its author.

I found Tuyeni H. Mwampamba, Ph.D., in Morelia, Mexico, where the Tanzania native and U.C. Davis graduate is currently doing her post-doc research.

Following is a transcript of our conversation.

Think wood and charcoal are interchangeable? Guess again.

Q: In your paper you wrote that it was important to make a distinction between charcoal and firewood, and that past studies have greatly underestimated the individual impact of charcoal. What did you mean by that?

There are drastic differences between charcoal and firewood that are blurred when you lump the two together.

The first big difference is that in most cases firewood does not require chopping down an entire tree: branches are chopped, dead logs are collected. Charcoal production almost always requires cutting down trees to stump level. So, the impact on forests is much larger for charcoal. This is not to say that firewood collection cannot degrade a forest. There are cases, even in Tanzania, where forest degradation is attributed to firewood rather than charcoal.

Secondly, most of the potential energy contained in firewood is used up to heat the end product, while only a fraction of the energy contained in wood that is converted to charcoal is ever utilized in the final end-use. This is because firewood is used directly as is, while charcoal must first be processed from wood before it is applied as a source of heat. Firewood is not a perfect source of heat, of course: there are lots of impurities, smoke, and inefficient firewood stoves allow a lot of that heat to escape.

Furthermore, the caloric energy per unit (kilogram) of firewood is lower than that of charcoal. The conversion of wood to charcoal is done under high heat and low oxygen conditions. The heat generated during the production process does not contribute to any cooking or heating; it is, for all means and purposes, wasted. The heat in charcoal that contributes to making meals and heating water in households is thus only a fraction of the total heat originally available in the wood. Depending on kiln efficiencies, 100 kg of wood produces 8 – 23 kg of charcoal.

Hence, when someone switches from firewood use to charcoal, their impact on forests increases exponentially. Yet, we still refer to this as “moving up the energy ladder” because the impact on their health and quality of life is drastically improved. If you lump all woodfuel use together and fail to distinguish between charcoal and firewood use, you run the risk of grossly underestimating or overestimating the impact on forests.

Another important difference between charcoal and firewood is the source (and thus size) of the demand. Firewood is largely used in rural areas while charcoal demand is driven by urban population growth. Urban population trajectories for cities in most African nations indicate that by 2050 or so, more than 60 percent of populations will be living in cities and towns. So, if one were to project future woodfuel needs, you might see an increase in charcoal consumption in urban areas and a drop in rural areas.

Tanzania’s charcoal crisis: best and worst case scenarios

Q: What do you mean by charcoal crisis and do you think Tanzania might face this down the road?

What I mean is that, in the worst-case scenario, charcoal in the marketplace would become scarce, it would be overly expensive, and urban households would return to using firewood and other poor quality biomass to cook.

That could lead to the chopping down of urban shade trees and landscaped trees in cities for firewood.  I saw images of this in the winter of 2007 and 2008 in Tajikistan when there was an energy crises accompanied by a very cold winter. The roadside trees were cut, trees were uprooted such that even the roots were used for firewood.

 

You see this too in places like Zanzibar, where palm trees, cashew trees and mango trees get chopped down for charcoal and/or firewood. I see it happening in Tanzania too, in rural areas surrounded by forests, where you would not expect there to be a shortage of trees. In my study area in Tanzania, recent wealth among the rice growers enabled households to upgrade to mud-brick homes. This improvement required firewood to cure the bricks. Access to forests is restricted by new community rules so old mango trees and palm trees are now being harvested to provide the firewood.

In a place like Dar es Salaam, it may be just back to firewood from whatever tree one can find, or scrambling for wood from building sites.

Some may also try to move another step up the energy ladder to kerosene stoves. The expense of that, however, may send other people back to the countryside because life in the cities would be unaffordable.

If, for instance there were policy changes implemented that suddenly saw every household in Dar es Salaam and Arusha owning and using a gas stove, then one could predict a lot of horrible scenarios each of which may never come to happen.

It would not be the first time that Tanzania experiences a step down the energy ladder. For example, there are fewer Tanzanians today using electricity to cook than in the 1980s. Those who abandoned their electric stoves moved to kerosene and charcoal stoves.

Will Tanzania face a charcoal crisis down the road? It is difficult to say. Maybe not. I say this not because I think that demand for charcoal will decrease in the future, but rather because I think there will be more options for alternative sources of charcoal, specifically charcoal briquettes.

What I think is likely to happen is that alternative charcoal options such as charcoal briquettes will play an increasingly larger role in the woodfuel market because traditional charcoal producers will find it harder and harder to produce charcoal in public forests.

Decentralization of forest governance in Tanzania is putting many such forests into the hands of communities, who, with the onset of REDD, carbon markets and payment for ecosystem services, will exclude charcoal production from their forests to receive payments for sustainable forest management. Traditional charcoal production will become more clandestine, risks will go up, and charcoal prices will eventually reflect this and may inspire users to shift to briquettes.

If you combine charcoal briquettes with more efficient stoves, and increased use of gas by some of the better off urban households, you start believing that a crisis can be averted. But if you look at how difficult it has been to convince households to switch to efficient charcoal stoves, however, the possibility of a crisis creeps up again.

Searching for Solutions

Q: Past attempts to ban charcoal production by the government of Tanzania have failed. And efforts to promote the consumption of other fuels like LPG, kerosene, and electricity in urban areas have not proven to be financially viable. What’s the solution?

Indeed, there have been numerous attempts by the Tanzanian government to ban charcoal, some of them in recent years. The longest ban may have lasted 2 weeks. You cannot ban what is essentially the only available cooking energy in urban areas without providing feasible alternatives. I think these bans have not been good for environmentalists because it has been as if the government has cried ‘wolf’ too many times.

Other efforts have not registered much success, either. The import tax on LPG home equipment has recently been eliminated, however, and there is talk that LPG distribution sites are springing up in more corners in Dar es Salaam. I’m not sure how well Moto Poa (an ethanol-based gel that was launched a couple of years ago) is doing in terms of enticing folks away from charcoal to cleaner fuels. It is clearly time to reassess the cooking energy market in Tanzania. The real danger, however, is that the Tanzanian government abandons all efforts to promote sustainable charcoal production because it believes that the alternatives will replace charcoal. I, for one, don’t believe that they will, not for a long time.

I also think that one of the reasons that efforts to promote alternative fuels have mostly failed is because we are missing out on something important, unrelated to market forces perhaps. People have to believe that gas and other sources of energy are equivalent or better than charcoal to do a switch. They have to believe that it will improve their  lives substantially. The urban poor in Tanzania can afford a cell phone, which costs 30 – 80,000 shillings (about $23 to $60 US, E16 to E42 Euro. An improved charcoal stove costs 4000 shillings ($3 US, 2 Euro). There are clearly tangible or non-tangible benefits to having a phone that are much beyond those of owning an improved charcoal stove. Something is going on, and until we find out, switches to other fuel sources will be slow.

So you see this as a social marketing issue?

Indeed. I think that, to a large extent, people have voted: yes to charcoal, no to firewood, no to electricity and no to kerosene. I don´t think that gas has done a good enough campaigning job, which is why it is underutilized. Given the choices, it may just be that people are very content with charcoal. Commercials on TV and radio about how bad charcoal is for Tanzanian forests are not the way to go about it, in my opinion. So yes, I think more research is needed in the social marketing arena in Tanzania. I´d concentrate all those research efforts in Dar es Salaam, because if Dar es Salaam shifts to gas or non-forest based charcoal, at least 50% of the charcoal problem will disappear.

Other solutions could include non-forest based charcoal, such as charcoal briquettes produced from agricultural waste products. It requires minimal shifts from the current status quo and is actually renewable.

Capturing gas from landfills is also a possibility. It’s a perfect CDM project but probably can’t generate sufficient volume.

Using bi-products from petroleum refinery could also be considered. I would say anything that does not involve digging up and burning carbon reserves.

I am not a strong fan of coal briquettes or digging around our coastline to find gas reserves to meet our cooking energy needs.